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.
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.
Despite being a debut feature, Eismayer first and foremost denotes great directorial maturity and a never obvious ability to delve into the human soul, managing to capture every subtle nuance of the protagonists’ personalities. At the 79th Venice Film Festival, section Settimana della Critica.
The working-class struggle, the need to ‘grow up’, but also – and above all – love torments are the absolute protagonists in Taking it Back. Andreas Schmied, who has always had a great aptitude for entertaining comedies, has attempted a mix of social discourse and sentimental aspects, paying more attention to the latter.
Fox in a Hole can be considered a film about incommunicability that can only be overcome when a particular common language is discovered. And thus music finally comes into play.
Although Aufschneider stands out immediately for its television-like writing and directorial approach, everything flows in an overall linear way. Every single event, every single story of the characters are somehow connected. Often, however, also in an excessively predictable manner.
Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies gets us into the heart of the matter almost immediately, creating successful moments of suspense, alternating with deliberately demential scenes. A humour, this one, that is good for the spirit, never excessive or unnecessary and that also reveals a great love for the seventh art.
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.
Drawing heavily on what has been made in the past, Andreas Prochaska, with Dead in 3 Days, has made one of his few feature films for the big screen, while showing clear evidence of his long career in television, in a very weak work, with an unsatisfactory script.