Midnight Screenings 2014 / Das finstere Tal / Austria, Germany 2013
A mysterious stranger on horseback settles down in a mountain village in order to wait out the winter. His arrival brings a sense of unease to the closed community of distrusting villagers. With one mysterious death after another, it soon becomes clear that his arrival was no coincidence. This Alpine Western brings a fresh variation on popular genre motifs.
A mysterious horseman rides into an isolated mountain village below the Alpine peaks. He is looking for a place to wait out the winter until the roads become passable again. However, the arrival of this silent stranger upsets the established order in a community ruled by an uncompromising patriarch. With the first snowfall, which entirely cuts off the village from the surrounding world, the locals begin to die under mysterious circumstances. It doesn’t take long before the villagers realize that the enigmatic visitor’s arrival was no coincidence. With his latest film, Austrian director Andreas Prochaska has created a homage to the Western genre in a captivating synthesis of intimately familiar themes and iconic images of the Austrian Alps. Offering an extraordinarily refreshing cinematic cocktail, the film works up a dense atmosphere combined with slick action that leaves the virginal winter landscape spattered with red.
115 min / Color, DCP
Director Andreas Prochaska
/ Screenplay Martin Ambrosch, Andreas Prochaska podle románu / based on the novel by Thomas Willmann
/ Dir. of Photography Thomas W. Kiennast
/ Music Matthias Weber
/ Editor Daniel Prochaska
/ Producer Helmut Grasser, Stefan Arndt
/ Production Allegro Film, X Filme Creative Pool
/ Coproduction SamFilm, ZDF, ORF
/ Cast Sam Riley, Paula Beer, Tobias Moretti, Clemens Schick
/ Contact Playtime
Andreas Prochaska (b. 1964, Vienna) began working in film as a production runner and eventually established himself as an editor on such films as Michael Haneke’s The Castle (Das Schloß, 1997) and Funny Games (1997). In the late 1990s he began directing television movies, often crime dramas. Outside television he gained credit with Dead in Three Days (In 3 Tagen bist du tot, 2006), which clearly showed his inclination towards genre work. The film was screened at numerous international festivals, including Karlovy Vary, and was a giant commercial hit in Austria. He repeated this domestic cinematic success with the madcap comedy The Unintentional Kidnapping of Mrs. Elfriede Ott (Die unabsichtliche Entführung der Frau Elfriede Ott, 2010). The Dark Valley is his third film.
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