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.
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?
In The Seventh Continent, Michael Haneke’s first feature film, what we observe is the progressive and sudden disintegration of the contemporary bourgeois family, observed and approached in an almost Schnitzlerian style, complete with omnipresent violence that is never really represented before our eyes. A constant theme, this, in Haneke’s rich filmography.
How I Taught Myself to be a Child, directed by Rupert Henning, is a film that often falters, that goes around in circles due to the multiple narrative twists within it, that often goes over the top. Yet all this is complemented by a vitality and freshness excellently portrayed by the young, lively and at the same time extraordinarily composed Valentin Hagg in the title role. Real added value for the film.