In Speak Easy everyone talks to someone on the phone. Yet this could even be considered a film about incommunicability. Every teenager has his or her own language that is often incomprehensible to adults and, at the same time, every conversation is “filtered” through the telephone.
In Knittelfeld – A Town without a History we find a good mix of reality and fiction, emblematic of the many crimes that are committed every day in realities where order and peace seem to reign. At the Viennale 2022, section Österreich real.
In Somewhere Else we see different approaches to life, to present and future. What Barbara Albert primarily wanted to communicate to us is an albeit weak and uncertain message of hope, as well as a strong, very strong desire to start again. At the Viennale 2022, section Österreich real.
In The Bosom Friend Ulrich Seidl has once again given us a character we will not easily forget. A character who almost seems to belong to a world apart and who – according to some of the director’s own statements – after having renounced all forms of earning a living or social relationships, may also have found freedom in his own way.
The Unfish is a decidedly original feature film as far as Austrian cinema is concerned. Director Robert Dornhelm, for his part, was clearly interested in what was being made abroad, showing particular curiosity in 1980s fantasy films.
Although it presents quite a few problems, Single Bells – directed by Xaver Schwarzenberger in 1997 and co-produced by Austria and Germany – skilfully avoids all the rhetoric and cheap feel-goodism into which situations of this kind can easily fall. And it also does so without being afraid to “play dirty “.