Images of places visited, journeys travelled, worlds entered, artists and historical figures encountered by Austrian experimental filmmaker Michael Pilz.
Over the course of these films, we share intimate dialogues with figures as varied and as culturally significant as Lou Reed, Jonas Mekas, sculptor Karl Prantl, and playwright and filmmaker Jack Garfein as well as encounter unknown, idiosyncratic, and mesmerizing interlocutors like the extraordinary New York cabbie in Facts for Fiction (with whom we share a night on the job) or the verbose Styrian painter living in the USA we meet in Bridge to Montecello. Their presences here are revived from his own vast personal archive of sounds and images and reworked into a form often only decades later.
Pilz’s floating portraits are, paradoxically, rooted in specific places—locales as much a part of the fabric of his portraits as any other: the mountain village in his epic Heaven and Earth, the lobbies and offices of Anthology Film Archives in New York, the streets of Prague in the ‘90s, the Park of Remembrance in Venice. Pilz’s fiction film, Feldberg, is another kind of portrait: a man and a woman interacting silently in a forest, alone. The intensity of that portrait creates a meditative awareness of the world, a deepening of our relationship to images, an overwhelming sense of the beauty of simple interactions.
Presented in partnership with the Austrian Film Museum as a compliment to their recent Pilz retrospective So Much Beauty.
In cooperation with
DAFilms.com is powered by Doc Alliance, a creative partnership of 7 key European documentary film festivals. Our aim is to advance the documentary genre, support its diversity and promote quality creative documentary films.
