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.
It is based on a real-life news story 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. In the film – which is divided into five chapters, each concerning a particular day – everything takes place from October 12 to December 23, 1993. Everything leads up to a single event in which all the characters will be involved in one way or another. But how important is the human being in this feature film by Michael Haneke?
Narcissus and Goldmund is a film that, despite the undoubted mastery of director Stefan Ruzowitzky, despite the high budget employed and a respectable cast, despite visually and symbolically powerful moments, is overall excessively contrived and pretentious.
In Little Big Voice – a television film directed by Wolfgang Murnberger in 2015 – good feelings, in the end – and as one can well imagine – always triumph. And they do so, again and again, in an almost forced way, with overly abrupt narrative twists. So abrupt that they almost lose credibility.
Kai Wessel’s Fog in August presents a mise-en-scène with mainly monochrome cinematography, in which the lighting is always too low, too weak. A mise-en-scene that is also complemented by a script in which the bravest characters, the most justice-seeking characters never really manage to make their voices heard.
Fully following the canons of the mainstream television film that we all too often come across in German productions, North Face, co-produced by Germany, Austria and Switzerland and directed by German director Philipp Stölzl, doesn’t know how to exploit its opportunities (first and foremost, the climb undertaken by the four protagonists), making the whole thing excessively flat and rhythmless.