An extraordinary calm and a welcome serenity pervade Vorfrühling am Attersee, conceived, like many other tourist documentaries made in the early 20th century, to appeal to as many tourists as possible in Austria and to give abroad an image of the nation where prosperity was commonplace.
Halfway between an actual advertising film and a documentary, Mariazell shows us in full, in just two minutes, the small town much loved by the Austrians, complete with a focus on the most characteristic sites of the place.
We do not see in Louis van Beethoven a composer at work. We do not witness the creative process that led to the birth of some of his most famous compositions. Not the end result, but what, fundamentally, led to it. An undoubtedly winning idea, which, however, made Niki Stein’s feature film an excessively dispersive work, in which the director himself seems too cold towards his protagonist and his works.
In Reichtum der Wälder Albert Quendler shows us every single process from the felling of the trees to the transport of the wood on board a locomotive. His camera focuses on every detail, while emphasising the value of the materials handled and making the documentary stand out first and foremost for its welcome lyricism and its own, marked personality.
On behalf of the board of the Franz Grabner Foundation, the Diagonale is pleased to announce the nominations for the Franz Grabner Award 2022.
Die Tat des Andreas Harmer is an extremely sophisticated noir, where – just as the great Fritz Lang had shown us in Metropolis in 1926 – the clear separation between good and evil is well represented on two levels by the settings, be they the basement of a building and the sewers of the city or a sunny park on a hot summer’s day.
In As of tomorrow, sometimes clumsy direction and often predictable script twists make us feel nostalgic not only for Mario Monicelli’s famous Big Deal on Madonna Street, but also for the comedies directed by Franz Antel himself in Austria in the 1940s and 1950s.
Vienna is more alive than ever in Symphonie Wien. Albert Quendler, for his part, has opted for an extremely innovative directorial approach, creating a successful mix of film, dance, theatre and, of course, documentary film, without being afraid to ‘play’ with the seventh art, exploiting every possibility it offers us.
Topics such as death, life and the time we have left are the absolute protagonists. Our life often depends on how we ourselves deal with it. One Left by Sebastian Doringer is a hymn to life, a message of hope that comes to us like a fresh spring breeze.
As part of the festival opening on April 5, the Diagonale’22 will award the Grand Diagonale Acting Award 2022 for services to Austrian film culture for the 15th time. The Diagonale is pleased to announce that this year’s award goes to Branko Samarovski. The stage, film and television actor will receive the award – an artwork by Constantin Luser – in Graz personally.