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by Ludwig Wüst
grade: 8.5
ABC is a constantly evolving journey towards a future full of new discoveries and new ways of understanding art and reality. The memory of bygone times and how we have become what we are today. A true love letter to life, to friendship, to Cinema. At the Diagonale’23.
How everything began
What is friendship according to director Ludwig Wüst? Simple: friendship is getting to know new worlds every day, friendship is joy, but also emotion in remembering bygone times, friendship is experiencing new paths together, friendship is life. Friendship is Cinema. And so, in his experimental feature film ABC, premiered at the Diagonale’23, we see how the concept of friendship acts as a common thread throughout a journey that began twenty-five years ago. A journey that would have taken our director far, very far.
Divided into three sections, therefore, ABC shows us three highlights of Wüst’s career. In the first section (A) we see some footage shot by the director during a journey he made to Egypt in 1999. In the second section (B), which initially had the working title Kain & Abel, two friends laugh, joke and talk about filmmaking. Finally, in the third section (C), we witness Wust’s first experiments in 2021 with a Super-8 camera together with his friend and colleague Gudrun Fürlinger.
In ABC, therefore, we see how the relationship between the director and cinema itself was born and how it evolved over the years. When Wüst started making his first films in Egypt, he had not yet decided that he wanted to be a director. Images of families gathered around a fire, in the middle of the desert, about to eat dinner immediately acquire an extremely poetic and evocative charm. Only three years later Wüst would shoot Egyptian Eclipse, his first feature film. The camera, uncertain at first but well aware of what it wants to film, seems to know better than anyone which way to go.
Similarly, a short film shot almost for fun in 2018, which was later to become a full-length feature, turned out to be complete and perfect as it is. And finally, the discovery of a fascinating new way of filming reality is opening the way to a new, exciting adventure.
ABC is probably Ludwig Wüst’s most personal film. A film whose project began only three years ago, during the first lockdown, when the director rewatched some of the first films he shot. Themes such as friendship, the discovery of oneself and one’s vocation and, above all, a great, great love for cinema are the absolute protagonists. It could even be said that in ABC there are traces of Wüst’s entire oeuvre, themes further developed in his better-known feature films. ABC, then, is a constantly evolving journey towards a future full of new discoveries and new ways of understanding art and reality. The memory of bygone times and how we have become what we are today. A true love letter to life, to friendship, to Cinema.
Original title: ABC
Directed by: Ludwig Wüst
Country/year: Austria / 2023
Running time: 78’
Genre: drama, experimental
Cast: Peter Pertussini, Markus Schramm
Screenplay: Ludwig Wüst
Cinematography: Ludwig Wüst, Klemens Koscher, Gudrun Fürlinger
Produced by: ludwigwuest.works