In Doorfourteen, an empty space can still seem incredibly alive and vibrant, and the stories that gradually come to life are actually telling us not about the flat depicted in the short film, but about the people themselves who are trying to imagine them.
Ene Mene Muh – Und tot bist du! is a delightful comedy in which the murders that take place inside the aforementioned retirement home never take on dark or dramatic connotations but, on the contrary, end up being a true ode to life and, in particular, to those who have had the opportunity to live a particularly long life.
The Piano Teacher is a sometimes cruel, painful and disturbing film, which, in depicting the drama of a woman with whom none of us (almost never) feel empathy, shows above all a great understanding of the human soul. At the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.
In Our Balance of Performance, through the metaphor of a card game, we too feel almost like ‘pawns’ within a much bigger system.
Copy Shop is present and future. The loss of identity and subjectivity due to modern media. Copy Shop is the loss of all certainty, in a world where we no longer know what is true and what is not.
That’s All is an exciting and moving journey between past and present, in which fragments of everyday life are shown to us almost like old photographs. Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel have once again brought to life on screen a reality that almost seems to belong to a world apart. Once again, as usual in their works, what is told to us almost takes on the character of a fairy tale.
Homemad(e) is a precious document of a world that was and a world that is. A journey through 20th-century Viennese history, through a series of images, faces and testimonies of those who, mindful of a sometimes painful past, have decided to tell their stories about Vienna entering a new millennium.
The final scene of the short film Flora – with the protagonist running towards an unknown destination – shows even more parallels with Lovely Rita. Here, however, everything is taken to the extreme, everything is starker, more real. And the hope for a better future, evident at the end of the previous short film, now seems to be only a vague memory.
Absent from the 76th Venice Film Festival, Ulrich Seidl couldn’t present Wicked Games, his newest work. Yet, the controversial Austrian director is now at home at the Lido. Suffice it to say that his international notoriety was officially achieved in 2001, when he presented in competition Dog Days, which won the Grand Jury Prize.