Einst süsse Heimat

(Beyond the Forest)
by Gerald Igor Hauzenberger
78', 35 mm Colour, Austria, 2007

At the foot of the Transylvanian mountains live the last survivors of a German minority, the Saxons, and of an Austrian one, the Landlers. These are people who, with difficulty, have kept alive their own language and traditions in small villages of striking and melancholy beauty where progress seems to have come to a standstill thirty years ago. Two elderly people are the protagonists of this film. Johann Schuff, a solitary farmer, who experienced World War II; he signed up with the Waffen-SS and inherited a doctrine from which he is now unable to distance himself. 65 kilometers away lives Marie Huber who, on the other hand, suffered for five long years in a Russian concentration camp. These two protagonists, one so different from the other, seem to have in common only the thought of death, a dramatic metaphor for the death of the culture of which they are the final heirs.

Gerald Igor Hauzenberger
Born in 1968 in Alkoven, he studied film and theater in Berlin and Vienna. Since the mid-1990s he has worked as director, cameraman, and producer of experimental films and documentaries. He teaches at the St. Pölten High School and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.