In Axel Corti’s Radetzkymarsch (which was finished by Gernot Roll after the director’s sudden death), alongside the parable about the empire there is a particular focus on the father/son relationship and what the two protagonists never managed to say to each other. All this is staged also thanks to the excellent performances of a very good cast, within which the great Max von Sydow stands out.
From a sophisticated work on vintage photographs, Maya Sarfaty’s Love it was not draws its most brilliant inspiration, creating, time after time, further photomontages, which, more and more complex and carefully edited in 3D, lead us by the hand into the world of Helena and Franz, in a love and suffering story where a usual documentary approach gives way to a mise en scène that successfully combines archive footage and present-day techniques.
It’s immediately clear that O Palmenbaum is not an ambitious feature film. Its main purpose is to stage the bizarre adventures of the Treichl/Moor families, which the audience loved so much in Single Bells. And this, considered from this point of view, works, especially if one thinks that, compared to numerous other sequels, the structure of the previous feature film is never taken up, in order to create a sort of “carbon copy” of it.
It was the painter and filmmaker Maria Lassnig who pioneered the theory of ‘body awareness’. In her paintings – as well as in her films – the human figures depicted – many of them self-portraits – often appear incomplete, sometimes in unnatural poses, a perfect mirror of the society of the time, constantly observed and criticised. And it is precisely her critique of materialism, as well as a marked feminism, the common thread of all her works.
A film, Wired for Music – Inside the Wiener Symphoniker, which radiates passion, which identifies itself with its protagonists from the very first minutes, which follows them discreetly and confidently and which, at times, only suffers from some overly contrived dialogue that inevitably loses its verve.
Fox in a Hole, the new feature film by director Arman T. Riahi, will open the Diagonale’21. The Festival of Austrian Film is planned as a live event and will take place following a strict Covid-19 safety concept from March 16 to 21 in Graz.
Brücken über Brücken is a lively and pulsating documentary, a precious testimony and vibrant fresco of a city – Vienna – as the heart of contemporary Central Europe and – also due to its particular geographical location – as the crossroads of many stories and cultures.
Greek mythology has found an ideal adaptation in Alkeste – Die Bedeutung, Protektion zu haben, for a story of love and death set in a rugged – but extremely poetic – Vienna of the 1970s. And Euripides’ Alcestis is here staged in a never banal or predictable way, with a directorial approach that at times recalls the French Nouvelle Vague.
A film, Die gelbe Nachtigall, which represents a turning point in Franz Antel’s career. If, in fact, on the one hand, the director, with this film, for the first time directly confronted himself with a new medium, television, on the other hand, a sort of return to the past is evident. A sort of return to the glorious Wiener Films that were so important at the beginning and for most of his career.
In Austria2Australia, an overly selective editing – together with a practically omnipresent music, which contributes to giving the whole thing a purely television character – makes the entire film lose much of its verve and personality. Despite its many potentials.