Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska's The Children of the Dead is showing February 20 - March 20, 2020 on Mubi in the series Direct from the Berlinale.Above: Behind the scenes of The Children of the Dead. Photo by Ditz FejerIn 2016 we were invited by the Austrian art and performance festival, steirischer herbst, to make a project in the Styrian countryside. We knew we wanted to ground ourselves to a particular place—to go deep, to make something which would be rooted in landscape and land, time and tide. We were drawn to the heimatfilme and bergfilme genres, that naively celebrate landscape and rural life (in reaction to the horrors of WWII) and we were looking for a Austrian text to build this work upon... when someone suggested we should read Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten, a 666-page epic entirely rooted in the Styrian landscape, a book in which the...
- 2/12/2020
- MUBI
The hills are alive, with the sound of music (also mastication and the moaning of zombies) in Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska’s experimental, dialogue-free, home-movie-style riff on Elfriede Jelinek’s “Die Kinder Der Toten” (The Children of the Dead). A seminal text in Jelinek’s native Austria, the 1995 book has never been translated into English, and so the directors, who are part of New York-based performance group the Nature Theater of Oklahoma were reportedly working from a sort of CliffsNotes version of this sprawling, complex, metatextual novel — one that had hitherto been dubbed “unfilmable.”
That’s an assessment barely contradicted by Copper and Liska’s tiresome adaptation, which starts out buoyantly inventive but quickly turns grating, its one-joke premise wearing thinner as the grotesquerie is layered on thicker. Initially, however, it provides an aesthetic surprise, shot in deliciously grainy Super-8 footage, set to Wolfgang Mitterer’s bizarro-folksy score and...
That’s an assessment barely contradicted by Copper and Liska’s tiresome adaptation, which starts out buoyantly inventive but quickly turns grating, its one-joke premise wearing thinner as the grotesquerie is layered on thicker. Initially, however, it provides an aesthetic surprise, shot in deliciously grainy Super-8 footage, set to Wolfgang Mitterer’s bizarro-folksy score and...
- 4/19/2019
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Photo courtesy of Pablo Ocqueteau and Berlinale 2019Below you will find our favorite films of the 69th Berlin International Film Festival, as well as an index of our coverage.AwardsFAVORITE Filmsdaniel KASMANHeimat Is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise)Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Frank Beauvais)Fourteen (Dan Sallitt)I Was at Home, But... (Angela Schanelec)Synonyms (Nadav Lapid)The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow)Delphine and Carole (Callisto McNulty)Holy Beasts Years of Construction (Heinz Emigholz)Bait (Mark Jenkins)Giovanni Marchini CAMIASynonyms (Nadav Lapid)I Was at Home, But... (Angela Schanelec)The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow)Just Don't Think I'll Scream (Frank Beauvais)The Blue Flower of Novalis (Gustavo Vinagre & Rodrigo Carneiro)The Portuguese Woman (Rita Azevedo Gomes)The Last to See Them (Sara Summa)Earth (Nikolaus Geyrhalter)Heimat Is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise)Ms Slavic 7 (Sofia Bohdanowicz & Deragh Campbell)Jordan Cronki Was at Home, But... (Angela Schanelec...
- 2/28/2019
- MUBI
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