Quality contemporary cinema

Austrian Film Week comes to Israel.

By HANNAH BROWN
‘GRUBER IS LEAVING’ (photo credit: Courtesy)
‘GRUBER IS LEAVING’
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Austrian Film Week in Israel, which takes place from April 3 to 13 at the cinematheques in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Holon, Herzliya and Sderot, celebrates 60 years of diplomatic relations between Israel and Austria by showing the best of contemporary Austrian cinema. The film week also marks 15 years since the establishment of the Austrian Cultural Forum Tel Aviv.
Umut Dag, the director of the film Cracks in Concrete, will attend the screenings. The film takes a look at the lives of two young men at different points in their lives. Ertan is released from prison after serving 10 years for a violent crime, and he feels he is a broken man. Mikail is a teen who spends his days hanging out with friends and trying to break into rap music. There is a connection between the two that only Ertan is aware of at first.
Andrina Mracnikar will be present at the screening of her film, Ma Folie.
It starts out as a romance and ends up as a psychological thriller. It tells the story of Hanna (Alice Dwyer), who falls in love with a man named Yann (Sabin Tambrea), who sends her poetic films he has made on his cell phone. Although Yann loves her, he doesn’t trust her, and soon his love films turn into threats, and Hanna doesn’t know who to trust.
The movie is the first feature by Mracnikar, a graduate of the Talent Campus at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Gruber Is Leaving, directed by Marie Kreutzer, tells the story of an egocentric young man whose life changes when he is diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly, his life is more complicated than deciding which new nightclub to go to, and he starts falling for a woman he wouldn’t have been interested in before. This is the much-awaited follow-up to her debut film, the 2011 movie The Fatherless, which told the story of estranged siblings who come together after their father’s death.
The Austrian film industry includes movie makers working in all genres.
Goodnight Mommy, directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, is a horror movie that has won 18 awards at festivals around the world. It tells the chilling story of twin boys who move to a new home with their mother, who has just had cosmetic surgery. But the boys begin to suspect that the woman under the bandages is not their mother, since she is so much less trusting and more controlling. The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “The intense concentration on primordial mother-child ties, their steady perversion and the psychological damage of withheld love makes this film riveting and visceral.” The movie was co-produced by Ulrich Seidl, one of Austria’s most celebrated directors, known for the dark Paradise trilogy and Dog Days.
Super Ego, directed by Benjamin Heisenberg (the grandson of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg), is an offbeat bromance about Curt Leidig (André Wilms), an octogenarian psychologist with a shadowy Nazi past, and Nick Gutlicht (Georg Friedrich), a young small-time crook. When chance brings them together, Dr. Leidig makes his study of his “not uninteresting patient.” They begin carrying out Freudianinfluenced acts of transference and counter-transference, which lead them both to question their lives and their identities. Heisenberg’s debut feature, Sleeper, was screened at Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2005; and his second film, The Robber, competed for the Golden Bear at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival.
Nathalie Borgers’s Catching Haider is a documentary about the late rightwing Austrian politician Jorg Haider, who was governor of Carinthia and has a loyal following, even seven years after his death.
For more information and to order tickets, go to http://www.bmeia.gv.at/ en/austrian-cultural-forum-tel-aviv/ or the websites of the individual cinematheques.