With Mermaids don’t cry, director Franziska Pflaum has realised a kind of delicate and symbolic contemporary fairytale, in which a magnetic protagonist represents a kind of postmodern heroine on her (often difficult) path towards a new self-awareness. At the Diagonale’23.
The Tobacconist is undoubtedly an interesting feature film, but it gets lost in the many paths it decides to take. And not even the presence of Bruno Ganz or a cameo by the great Erni Mangold can do much.
My Best Enemy is a feature film with an international scope, which draws heavily on mainstream US cinema. World War II and the Holocaust are recounted in Austria in an important film, in which, alongside the story of the two friends/enemies and the dramatic war, there is also a great homage to the art world and to beauty.
The Robber focuses mainly on the complex inner world of its protagonist, his constant need to run away, his difficulty in integrating into society and leading a normal life.
In The Impossible Picture, the interesting debut feature by young Sandra Wollner, the images on the screen initially show us a big family, used to deal with the strict figure of the grandmother. Moments of conviviality filmed around a laid table alternate with scenes in which the young women at home are used to share a bed for an afternoon nap on a hot summer afternoon. Then, suddenly, the music changes. And so the mood of the feature film gradually takes on supernatural overtones.
In Murer: Anatomy of a Trial, Christian Frosch, in staging the trial of the Nazi criminal Franz Murer with a composed and rightly balanced direction, openly points the finger at his own nation and at Austrian society of yesterday and today.