It’s the early 1950s and little Franzi is growing up in the small Austrian town of Judenburg. Her oppressive family home is dominated by her feverish and mentally ill father, who is rigid and unpredictable. Her father, who regularly delivers halves of pork for the butcher, spent several years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Algeria and Syria – a period which he partly glorifies but which still also haunts him. Franzi immerses herself in this world by looking at an abundance of beguiling yet disturbing photographs taken at the time by her father. Her own childish fantasy realm of fairy tales and picture books soon intermingle with nightmares as reality merges with imagination, war, horror and beauty.
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Reviews
A wild mix of childhood, parenting and adulthood gets thrown into your face with this feature that was shown at the Festival in Berlin. While some ideas were more than interesting, the movie itself felt like a bad mixture of clichés that was waiting to happen. There are some decent actors in this, none of which can really shine in a muddle of a story that does not really get you involved.It's not so much the time-lines that will give you a headache, but the fact that the movie seems to go on forever, even with a short running time. I'm pretty sure the filmmakers can do better than this and hopefully will, when they continue their journey (and hopefully surprise us ... which didn't happen with this movie at all).
