Films by Sergej Loznica and Albert Sackl

In the month of October, the Film Museum presents two very different works in its Premiere series, which regularly introduces outstanding examples of contemporary cinema. 

 

Sčasťe moe / My Joy (2010), the first feature film by Ukrainian director, Sergej Loznica, receives its Vienna premiere on October 13. Since the mid-1990s, Loznica has been internationally celebrated as one of today's great documentary filmmakers. At the premiere of My Joy at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, it soon became clear that his strengths also apply to the terrain of fiction. Loznica’s road movie is hyper-realistic in its depiction of contemporary Russia, but there is also a black comedy aspect to its cast of characters: the ghosts of the 20th century are still playing their ugly little games. Equipped with a highly unpredictable, fairy-tale-like narrative, My Joy is reminiscent of the great Russian novels – all roads, byways, encounters and hopes lead only to darkness, but the journey remains heartrending all the same.

 

On October 17, the Film Museum presents the world premiere of Albert Sackl's Im Freien / In the Open (2011). The young Austrian filmmaker, whose previous "handmade" studies of time have mostly revolved around his own body, clearly expands his range with this new film: "Day and night in a rugged, unspoiled landscape, from the Nordic summer to the beginning of autumn. Every three minutes an image is taken. 24 hours of real-time thus become 20 seconds, and 70 days and nights are compressed into 23 minutes of film." The result is a multiply layered work: a frenzied exploration of (Icelandic) nature, a mysterious piece of land art, a ghost dance of weather, body parts and strange objects, and a highly condensed series of spaces that only be delivered by the medium of film.