Disenchanted, rational and appropriately satirical – with even a touch of subtle irony – Lourdes, by pointing the finger at a hypocritical and “respectable” society that lives only on illusions, shows us a very different reality from the one we imagine.
Hotel sees its greatest strength in a direction made up of static and symmetrical frame compositions, with colours turning mainly to green or red. A power of images achieved thanks to the contribution of the cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, a long-time collaborator of Hausner and co-founder of the production company Coop99.
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.
With the Zur Person series, the Diagonale’20 turns its focus on the director Jessica Hausner and her widely acclaimed film oeuvre. Beginning from her most recent film Little Joe, which was the only Austrian entry represented in the competition at the Cannes film festival, the Diagonale’20 will show a comprehensive retrospective of Hausner’s oeuvre including the rediscovery of her early works as a film student.
As essential meeting point for film enthusiasts from Austria and abroad, the Diagonale screens roughly 100 current Austrian feature, documentary, and short films in its competition and awards Austria’s most highly endowed film prizes. From March 24 to 29, 2020 in Graz.
Little Joe, the sixth feature film by director Jessica Hausner, already in competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2019 (where the protagonist Emily Beecham won the Best Actress Award), is a deliberately ambiguous work, which does not aim to give precise answers to the questions raised and which makes this ambiguity its greatest strength. At the Viennale 2019.
With Flora, Jessica Hausner – similarly to what her colleague Barbara Albert did a couple of years later with Sunspots – began her journey into the world of the seventh art with an interesting coming-of-age, in which some basic features of what was to become her particular directorial approach could already be recognised.