26/03/2010

Hitting Austrian screens today is the meaningfully-titled feature Mein Kampf. This Austrian/German/Swiss co-production, by Swiss director Urs Odermatt (who has just completed his latest project, Der Böse Onkel), is not a biopic but rather a satirical parable on Hitler’s artistic youth in Vienna in 1910.

Here we see Hitler (played by Tom Schilling) as a penniless student sharing his room with two Jews, Lobkowitz the kosher cook and old Schlomo Herzl (Götz George), who is a father figure to Hitler. Increasingly megalomaniac, capricious and paranoid, Hitler ends up taking advantage of Herzl’s kindness and literary ambitions to launch into politics armed with his famous manifesto. Mein Kampf is distributed by Filmladen.

Meanwhile, Thimfilm is releasing Romanian director Robert-Adrian Pejo’s Austrian/Swiss/Hungarian co-production The Camera Murderer, starring Andreas Lust (who won international acclaim for Revanche [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Götz Spielmann
film profile] and his performance in The Robber [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Benjamin Heisenberg
film profile]). Adapted from a novel by Thomas Glavinic, the film recounts how the idyllic Easter holidays of two couples turn into a nightmare, against a backdrop of child kidnappings and snuff movies.

Audiences will also have the chance to discover Roland Reber’s German film Angels With Dirty Wings, a hymn to immorality and selfishness, whose three heroines travel the roads by motorbike, doing as they please. This film is distributed by wtp international.

Sixpackfilm is launching the documentary Totó, by Viennese director Peter Schreiner, who recently won an award at the Diagonale Austrian Film Festival. In this film, presented at Venice in the Horizons section, the director returns to the Italian-related themes, rediscovered native villages and dialects, which he previously explored in his prize-winning documentary Bellavista (Best Documentary at Diagonale in 2007). In Totó, memories of Calabria, the sea and his language engulf the Italian native of the title after 30 years living in Vienna.

Meanwhile, Tao-Cinemathek is distributing Boris Penth and Sogyal Rinpoche’s German/Dutch documentary Mitgefühl, Weisheit und Humor, about Tibet.

This week’s final European title, French director Pierre Morel’s From Paris With Love [+see also:
trailer
film profile], is launched by Universum, who released it in Germany yesterday. This Hollywood-style action film, produced by Luc Besson, stars John Travolta as an unscrupulous secret agent and Jonathan Rhys-Meyer as a young diplomat who, along with his improbable partner, confronts a terrorist threat in the City of Light.

(Translated from French)