Four adult children meet after the sudden death of their father. Family secrets, the past, and the present combine to create a tragic destiny of unfulfilled desire for an independent life. Although the film employs clichés typical of a family drama, the director successfully moves beyond them through her depiction of vivid and entirely authentic characters.
Two men and two women gather around their father’s deathbed. The four siblings meet at the home where they grew up and where several decades previously an attempt was made, drawing on the idealistic atmosphere of the 1960s, to live in an alternative community. But the community broke up and the individual members went their separate ways. The older daughter Kyra is seeing her siblings for the first time in 23 years, and everyone expects her presence to provoke unpleasant memories; no one wants to dredge up the past. Why, soon after her sister was born, did Kyra and her mother have to leave the community? Why did Kyra’s father Hans never respond to her letters? Family secrets, the past, and the present combine to create a tragic destiny of unfulfilled desire for an independent life. Although debut director Marie Kreutzer employs clichés typical of a family drama, she successfully moves beyond them through her depiction of vivid and entirely authentic characters.
104 min / Color, 35 mm
Director Marie Kreutzer
/ Screenplay Marie Kreutzer
/ Dir. of Photography Leena Koppe
/ Music David Hebenstreit
/ Editor Ulrike Kofler
/ Producer Marie Kreutzer
/ Production Novotny & Novotny
/ Cast Andreas Keindl, Andrea Wenzl, Emily Cox, Philipp Hochmair, Sami Loris, Pia Hierzegger
/ Contact Doc & Film International
Marie Kreutzer (b. 1977, Graz, Austria) graduated from an alternative high school with a focus on the arts. She then studied scriptwriting and dramaturgy at the Vienna Film Academy under Professor Walter Wippersberg, graduating with a thesis entitled The Dramaturgy of the Short Feature Film. For the feature Fräulein (Das Fräulein, dir. Andrea Staka, 2006) she and her co-writers were awarded a Swiss Film Prize for Best Screenplay, while the film itself took the Golden Leopard for Best Film at Locarno. Since 2000 she has shot seven shorts. The Fatherless is her feature film directorial debut.
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