HOMEMAD(E)

Marc Aurel-Strasse, Vienna: The last surviving Jewish textile merchant in what in former days was the textile district, the Iranian hotel proprietor and the Café Salzgries with its regulars. From summer 1999 until spring 2000, Ruth Beckermann undertook a series of small journeys on and around her own doorstep and investigated her locality with the help of a film camera. The film gives also evidence of the political turnabout which went along with the joining of the government-coalition by the extreme right.



DVCam/35mm - 84’ – color – 1:1,66
Dolby Digital - OV german
subtitles: english, french

A film by Ruth Beckermann
Cinematography Nurith Aviv, Ruth Beckermann, Peter Roehsler
Sound Christina Kaindl-Hönig
Editing Gertraud Luschützky, Dieter Pichler
with Adolf „Adi“ Doft, Djavad & Nasrin Alam, Helene Doft, Peter Ferber, Gernot Friedel, Elfriede Gerstl, Erika Göschl, Dieter Haspel, Ferri Heschmat, Franz Novotny, Kurt Kalb, Karl Pfeifer, Lisl Ponger, Gigi Martschitsch, Tina Reimann, Bobby Rosner, Franz Schuh, Senta Segall, Rudi Schmutz, Eduard Steinberger, Eleonore und Herbert Wolf

Premiere 8.2.2001, Internationales Forum des jungen Films Berlin
Cinema release 12.9. 2001, Votiv Kino Vienna
Festivals Berlin, Cinéma du réel Paris, Diagonale Graz etc.
 

As in all of Beckermann’s films, here, too, one finds historical sensitivity and a present that cannot exist separately from the past.
Katalog Jerusalem Film Festival 2001

VERENA MAYER, Have Some Coffee, Wait and See
Until today, the place where the Austrian mental state’s alpha and omega materialise is, despite all clichés, the coffeehouse. The film director actually wanted to document the life in a former Viennese shopping street that at least has two newspaper editorial offices, a hotel, and a brothel. But soon the Café Salzgries turns out to be the genius loci of Marc-Aurel-Street. True to Alfred Polgar’s motto that the coffeehouse is a world view, namely one with the innermost tenor of not looking at the world, the guests barely look up from their coffee cups, while spring, summer, and fall pass by.
homemad(e) is a commentary about Austria without a detectable abyss. And that is what makes it significant. As it lies in the nature of Austrian criticism to reveal abysses where there aren’t any, conversely they also emerge where they are not recognised. The most impressive scene of the film is when the old textile merchant Doft encounters an acquaintance. “You look smart” she flatters him. His siblings are a lot better looking, he appeases gracefully. Later you find out that he is the only family member who had survived Auschwitz.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feb. 8, 2001
___TEXTS
INTERVIEW ZU HOMEMAD(E) (German)
Karin Schiefer, 2001

___STREAM/DVD
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