Karl Hartl has paid a wonderful tribute to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His Whom the Gods Love – recently restored by Filmarchiv Austria and presented to the audience on the Filmarchiv On channel – still has the remarkable ability to captivate us today, many years after its release, with all its visual and communicative power.
The Glory of Life stages a love story that is classic in many aspects, focusing mainly on the two protagonists and their feelings, but ‘forgetting’ to delve into potential insights that could have inevitably enriched the whole.
The immortal music of Franz Schubert accompanies us throughout the entire screening. Music, but also painting make up a work, Schubert – A Stranger I came…, which unfolds simultaneously on several levels, taking us by the hand on a long journey between past and present that reaches the present day.
Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe by Maria Schrader and starring a great Josef Hader is a biopic that consciously rejects any pre-established pattern and that in its apparent simplicity soon reveals itself to be far more complex and layered than it might initially seem.
Inner conflicts, guilt, shame, fear opposed to the joy of liberation: in Persona non grata by Antonin Svoboda there is all this and much more.
Sleeping with a Tiger by Anja Salomonowitz is a complex and layered. extremely rich and sophisticated feature film. A feature film that is never afraid to exaggerate. Just as our beloved Maria Lassnig did in her time. At the Berlinale 2024, Forum section.
Despite being a heavily fictionalised feature film with many flaws, Crown Prince Rudolph’s last Love by Rudolf Jugert works. And it does so with a decidedly simple screenplay, which focuses first and foremost on the essentials without digressions and almost entirely devoid of subplots. Everything foreshadows an impending tragedy. The shadows get the better of the lights. Mary Vetsera’s naive face speaks for itself.
Made and edited as if it were an ideal continuation of his legacy as an artist, Klimt stages a dramatic depiction of episodes from the painter’s life in a highly imaginative and artificial Vienna. At the Viennale 2023, retrospective Raúl Ruiz.
Willi Forst’s fictional, black-and-white version of the life of composer Franz Schubert in Lover Divine is a work that embodies the romantic Zeitgeist of the 19th century more than ever before.
Taking direct inspiration from the paintings of Oskar Kokoschka, I’m Ok consists of many brushstrokes predominantly in shades of ochre, red and black and two-dimensional drawings with a distinctly expressionist character. The artist’s art and style are therefore the absolute protagonists, yet, at the same time, Elizabeth Hobbs has skilfully avoided any rhetoric, giving her short film its own, marked personality. At the festival Sotto le Stelle dell’Austria 2023.