15/06/2005

The Austrian production company Amour Fou is everywhere this season — not only is it represented at many festivals, but its productions belong to all genres, as each time Amour Fou has chosen original and talented authors.

The Ford brothers, specialists in experimental shorts, presented the musical with ‘found’ footage Bloodsample at various European festivals — including the International Short-Film Festival in Oberhausen, where the film won a MuVi Audience Award— while their film Preserving cultural traditions... continues a world tour with, amongst the upcoming events, the Dutch festival Media Art, which will take place this Autumn in Friesland (where Harald Hund and Paul Horn's Habibi Kebab will also be screened).

The no less daring Bady Minck can also boast many successes. The heroine’s furry tongue in her short film La belle et la bête will be the first image screened at the opening of Cinéfleuve (a festival which takes place on a boat and sets sail from Saarland to Walloon, starting on the 30th June). More importantly, since its world-premiere in Cannes (Directors' Fortnight 2003), Bady Minck's documentary Im Anfang war der Blick (In the Beginning Was the Eye), co-produced by Amour Fou, Oikodrom, Garabet and the Luxemburg company Minotaurus, visited no less than 72 festivals and was awarded, amongst others, a prize as Most Innovative Documentary at the Roma Art Doc Fest 2005, as well as a Special Distinction from the jury in Trento. Her next project, called LoMozart, is a lomographic composition for which she was commissioned for the Mozart Jubilee next year. She will be using some images created by the winners of an internet contest she launched, the results of which should be revealed soon.

As far as features are concerned, besides Fridolin Schönwiese's Volver la vista (presented last week in Innsbruck), Amour Fou can count on Crash Test Dummies, by Jörg Kalt, the film which was chosen to close the Austrian Film Festival in Paris (a well-attended event which took place yesterday), during which Thomas Woschitz' Josef Trilogy, a monochrome road-movie, with Jarmush-esque aspects, was also screened. Crash Test Dummies, which depicts, with much humour, the misadventures of a young Romanian couple stuck in Vienna, with no money to get back home, was co-produced by Icon Film and received public subsidies at regional and state-level. The film, which premiered at Berlin, received a prize at the Diagonale festival for the quality of its script. After Slovakia (the Trencianske Teplice International Film Festival) and South Africa, the film will be presented in Karlovy Vary, in the "Another View" section.

(Translated from French)