Mansur Madavi enjoyed surprising us, confusing us and making us completely identify with his protagonist. Just Behind the Door is a feature film that is both simple and complex at the same time. A feature film that treasures what has been made in the past, but nevertheless finds its own way, proving to be a true gem of Austrian cinema. As part of the retrospective Keine Angst by the Filmarchiv Austria.
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.
Rosa Friedrich has made Wander a living, pulsating, sincere and passionate feature film, in which images of young people resting on the lawn, playing blades of grass as if they were musical instruments, and serenely coexisting with animals become its greatest peculiarity. At the Diagonale’22.
In Flipper it is the cold, deafening and disturbing noise of the marbles within the game that takes centre stage. The woman speaks, but her words are inaudible. The man and the woman are close, but suddenly unable to move, since they seem to be tied in a sort of straitjacket. They both make faces and everything, for a moment, takes a deliberately grotesque turn.
Anything is possible in Charms Incidents. The series of events seems to follow no logic and what results are numerous highly Kafkaesque paradoxical situations.
Greek mythology has found an ideal adaptation in Alkeste – Die Bedeutung, Protektion zu haben, for a story of love and death set in a rugged – but extremely poetic – Vienna of the 1970s. And Euripides’ Alcestis is here staged in a never banal or predictable way, with a directorial approach that at times recalls the French Nouvelle Vague.
Constant, pounding sounds, especially in the first part, are the absolute protagonists in Magic Glass, Mansur Madavi’s debut film, which for certain aspects even reminds us of John Carpenter’s They Live, as well as of Jacques Tati’s Playtime. And when the protagonist finally seems to break out of that vicious circle that is the unhealthy, capitalist society, he seems to everyone to be insane, potentially dangerous to himself and others.
Important references to literature, philosophy and cinema itself, as well as an atmosphere as light as a feather and a welcome touch of surrealism – together with pastel colours, further enhanced by Super8 footage – best convey the essence of this short and precious Ad una Mela. Viennale 2020 trailer, directed by Alice Rohrwacher.
Everything is floating in a timeless dimension in Vergiss Sneider!, Götz Spielmann’s medium-length graduation film. And next to a dark humour in the background, next to a subtle as well as vibrant eroticism, next to characters whose obsessions are taken to the extreme, we see a theatrical mise-en-scène that clearly refers to the Theatre of the Absurd, without forgetting Roman Polanski himself or even the science fiction films of the glorious Hollywood of the 1950s and 1960s.
With an extremely essential mise-en-scène, Thomas Marschall has perfectly succeeded in giving his Ordinary Creatures a surreal and highly alienating character, thanks to figures that are now inexplicably mute and so inexpressive as to seem almost unfriendly, up to scenes with a strong dreamlike atmosphere.