Jack Raese went to eastern Germany hoping to find a small town documentary story. Instead, he found a village filled with Christmas toy makers, or as he describes it, the North Pole.
Directed, shot and edited by Jack Raese, the documentary short film, “The Chimney Sweeper” follows Markus Füchtner, a lifelong nutcracker maker whose family has carried the craft across generations.
“I knew I wanted to make a very rural film,” Raese said. “So I started reading little local papers and journals, just seeing what kinds of stories were out there.”
His search led him to a remote town on the Czech border, Deutschneudorf, where nearly every family in town makes wooden Christmas toys — nutcrackers, Schwibbögen and other handcarved holiday figures passed down through generations.
In throwing himself into the family and the storytelling of a household thousands of miles from home, Raese found clarity and connection to his own family and upbringing. “The Chimney Sweeper” began as a school assignment, but it became an affirmation of his craft and a lens through which he reexamined his own life, he said.
“I shot this film when I was 21,” he said. “I was at this point where I was trying to decide, is it realistic for me to try and make films for the rest of my life?”
Raese is a senior at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he studies screenwriting. “The Chimney Sweeper” is his first documentary, and a project Raese completed entirely on his own. Making this film meant traveling alone across Germany to a place that felt completely removed from everything Raese knew geographically, culturally and creatively.
Originally, he intended to make the film about Füchtner’s younger son, the one who didn’t want to inherit the nutcracker business and instead dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.
Raese said he could relate, growing up in a family where expectations were clearly defined, and where he, too, felt separate from the path laid out before him. But Füchtner’s son was shy and uncomfortable on camera, and so the film became about Füchtner and the legacy he leaves behind.
Raese handled the camera, sound and interviews himself, building an intimate relationship with Füchtner over the ten days he spent in his house.
“My adaptation of that was to focus completely on Markus, but do it with the sort of aesthetic as if I was in the family, shooting the whole film, framing the whole film, asking questions: if I were this man’s son, what would I want to know?” said Raese.
For Füchtner, the legacy is heavy, as is holding the stories of his forefathers, even when he carries it willingly. And while Füchtner now wishes to follow in the path of his grandfather, buried with a nutcracker in his arms, as a teenager, Füchtner once dreamed of becoming a chimney sweeper.
For Raese, watching Füchtner wrestle with tradition and the life-not-taken helped clarify his own path and affirmed for him the importance of following his passion. Watching Füchtner navigate tradition and the life he once imagined helped Raese reflect on his own relationship to family and expectation.
Making the film became an exercise in following a family’s history as it unfolded, a slow process of unpacking stories and histories from parents as one might over the course of their childhood, said Raese.
“We really got to know each other,” Raese said. “I wasn’t just there to make a movie. I was there for his story.”
Most of the footage in “The Chimney Sweeper” was captured in the last few days of Raese’s time there, he said. Raese followed Füchtner through his workshop and home, learning the rhythms of his days the same way someone inside the family might, and only after building up a foundation of trust and familiarity, turning on the camera to record.
“It was just me,” he said. “I was running the camera, running sound. When I asked him a question, I was the only one listening.”
In the months since, Raese has stayed in touch with Füchtner, and while he said learning the art of nutcracker making itself would take a lifetime, the experience left him with a new understanding of passion, family and the weight of expectation.
“I feel very lucky to be here,” he said. “To play a film at Sundance is every filmmaker’s dream. To do it at this phase of my career is unreal.”
While Raese typically works in fiction, the experience of making “The Chimney Sweeper” opened him up to documentary as a form he wants to continue exploring alongside his writing and narrative work.
“It’s helped me find my voice,” he said. “And emerge and figure out what it is that I’m doing and what I’d like to do.”
As for what comes next, Raese said, “I want to make more movies. That’s next. Another one, and another one, and keep doing it.”