Hotel sees its greatest strength in a direction made up of static and symmetrical frame compositions, with colours turning mainly to green or red. A power of images achieved thanks to the contribution of the cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, a long-time collaborator of Hausner and co-founder of the production company Coop99.
Everything is grey in The Future will not be capitalist. Concrete – often left exposed – reigns everywhere. And the human being, for his part, how does he react? Lost in their frenetic activities, employees do not even seem to have time to exchange a few words from time to time.
Are you sleeping, brother Jakob? is immediately characterised by a simple composition of images, where distinct colours, now bright – as in the valley where the four boys find themselves – and now darker – as at night, outside a mountain hut – almost become the absolute protagonists.
In Children Below Deck we see a deep sense of guilt that is passed on from generation to generation and that not even the passing years can ever alleviate. But, perhaps, only by facing the past itself – perhaps even through old photographs that slowly take shape on the screen, taking on, at first, the features of a pencil drawing – can one attempt, in some way, to get over it. Or maybe not?
If, while watching Omsch, on the one hand we are fascinated by such a tender and sincere story, on the other hand, we cannot help but notice how, as we approach the finale, the whole work seems somewhat self-referential.
In The First Sea there is very little place for adults. Everything is told on a child’s dimension and, overall, it slowly takes on the connotations of the cinema of François Truffaut or, better still, Abbas Kiarostami.
In Kick out your Boss, Elisabeth Scharang does not aim to make precise statements on the subject. She does not aim to expound certain theories concerning the conditions of workers all over the world. On the contrary, she leaves ample freedom for the audience to draw their own conclusions and make their own considerations.
No additional captions are needed in Evolution of Violence. The images speak for themselves. Cinema of reality in its purest sense. And this courageous work by Fritz Ofner, with its strongly minimalist mise-en-scène, wants above all to denounce a system that has been going on for far too long.
Everything flows, everything is in constant motion, in 2 Days Left. And everything, inevitably, is destined to return as before. As if nothing had happened, in a work from which an alienating sense of calm inevitably comes through, further conveyed by the colour gradations of the images in which the brightest shades of blue prevail.
In Electro Moscow, the two directors, perfectly in line with what they wanted to stage, opted for an unconventional directorial approach, where the absolute protagonists are – as one can well imagine – sounds and colours, past and present, which alternate with frenetic rhythms, leaving the audience no time to catch their breath between one scene and the next.