Variety Critics’ Choice: Europe Now! 2014 / Macondo / Austria 2013
Visit Vienna as a tourist and you aren’t likely to see kids like Ramasan, the 11-year-old subject of docu director Sudabeh Mortezai’s deeply humanist fiction debut. As an Iranian who split her childhood between Tehran and Vienna, Mortezai can clearly identify with the confused emotional state of her young protagonist.
Visit Vienna as a tourist and you aren’t likely to see kids like Ramasan, the 11-year-old subject of docu director Sudabeh Mortezai’s empathetically observed fiction debut. To find such foreigners, one must venture to the outskirts, where the eponymous immigrant settlement offers housing to nearly 2,000 refugees taking shelter from their home countries. As an Iranian who split her childhood between Tehran and Vienna, Mortezai can clearly identify with the confused emotional state of her young protagonist (Ramasan Minkailov), treating his unique situation as one example of Austria’s complex immigrant experience. Ramasan finds himself torn between Chechen custom and his new environment. Some of his friends retaliate against their surroundings, keying rich people’s cars and breaking into a work site that exploits underage immigrant laborers, and the film shows Ramasan trying to reconcile these impulses with his inner moral code.
Peter Debruge
98 min / Color, DCP
Director Sudabeh Mortezai
/ Screenplay Sudabeh Mortezai
/ Dir. of Photography Klemens Hufnagl
/ Editor Oliver Neumann
/ Producer Oliver Neumann, Sabine Moser
/ Production FreibeuterFilm
/ Cast Ramasan Minkailov, Aslan Elbiev, Kheda Gazieva
/ Contact Austrian Films, Films Boutique
Sudabeh Mortezai (b. 1968, Ludwigsburg, Germany) studied film and theater at the University of Vienna (1994), she went on to study film, television, and digital media at UCLA, from which she graduated in 2003. Afterwards, she worked as assistant director and production manager, and also shot several short films and two feature-length documentaries. The first, Children of the Prophet (2006), explores the Shiite holiday of Muharram by looking at four groups of people in Tehran. The second film, Bazaar of the Sexes (Im Bazaar der Geschlechter, 2009), offers a look at relations between men and women in contemporary Iran. Both documentaries received numerous awards, and her feature debut Macondo, about the conflict between disparate cultural influences, was shown in competition at this year’s Berlinale.
Austrian Films
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Austria
Phone: +43 152 633 23
E-mail: [email protected]
Films Boutique
Köpenicker Str. 184, 10997, Berlin
Germany
Phone: +49 306 953 7850
E-mail: [email protected]
Sudabeh Mortezai
Film Director
Oliver Neumann
Producer
Sabine Moser
Producer
Valeska Neu
Sales Agent
Martin Schweighofer
Film Institution Rep.
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