04/09/2006

Nine years after Northern Skirts, which won actress Nina Proll the Marcello Mastroianni Award, Viennese filmmaker Barbara Albert returns to the Lido with Falling [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Fallen). The Competition entry again stars Proll and focuses on five people, though this time around they are local women who were friends in school and meet again 14 years later at the funeral of one of their teachers.

Consciously mannered and using broad brushstrokes and pumping music, the film follows the five friends for 36 hours, as they move from the funeral to a wedding, on to a disco, a late-night camp-out, a Burger King parking lot and a shopping arcade. They have not seen each other for a long time and now seem unwilling to let go. “There is a small shock in bridging those 14 years,” explained the director in Venice, “and this shock allows the characters to consciously evaluate what has become of them in those years”.

Austrian Shooting Star and Albert-regular Kathrin Resetarits is part of the strong female ensemble that also includes Proll, Birgit Minichmayr and Ursula Strauss. On the repeated maxim “Wir sind Frei” (“We Are Free”), Resetarits commented: “We grew up thinking that politics could make us free, but we are not really free. Everything has become politicised: what we eat, what we want to buy”.

The film’s focus is clearly on the women (almost to the extent of excluding a possible male audience), but Albert says that she did not set out to make any statements about the female archetype or the situation of women in society. Nor was it her intention to make all women saintly and all males bad (though there are certainly no male role models in Falling): “Everyone has something of both good and bad inside them,” according to the director.

Falling was produced by Albert’s company Coop 99 and will be distributed this week in Italy by Lady Film . Sales are being handled by Films Distribution.