“Diagonale 07” (19-25 March 2007) – the 10th all-Austrian film festival in Graz – benefitted from a dozen awards and purses thanks to the largesse of 36 sponsors. An estimated €120,000 was handed out to the winners, the prizes voted upon by separate juries of professionals acquainted with the respective genres. On award night, to underscore personal responsibility, a lengthy declaration was read by the chairperson of the respective juries to explain the whys and wherefores of a decision. Graz, a picturesque university city, is also a movie town that boasts of a half-dozen arthouses catering to every need of the cineaste. Under artistic director Birgit Flos and managing director Oliver Testor, every effort was made to make even the experimental filmmaker and digital artist feel right at home.

A collector’s item, the 370-page Diagonale catalogue offers a wealth of information on films and filmmakers. Daily information bulletins highlighted conferences, forums, roundtables, lectures, and workshops on the current status of Austrian cinema. Press conferences were scheduled each morning at 10am in the Festivalzentrum Kunsthaus Graz. The festival center also provided the possibility of viewing on DVD nearly every film listed in the program. Although a proficiency in the German language may be a sine qua non for some foreign guests, the staff has a knack of helping one to find his way through a labyrinth of diversified film-and-video screenings. at the Diagonale

The opening night gala at the anniversary Diagonale took place in the Helmut-List-Halle, an all-purpose concert hall reconverted into a movie theater to accommodate the overflow of guests. The audience was treated first to a rerun of the trailers commissioned for the past nine Diagonale festivals. Sabine Derfinger then introduced the world premiere of her 42 plus, a light entertainment telefeature about a middle-age marriage crisis during the holiday season on the Italian coast. The closing night festivities were held in the Dom im Berg (read: Cathedral in the Mountain), a cave carved out of rock below the Schlossberg overlooking the city that’s used for concerts, exhibitions, and special events.

In three competition sections were screened the core of the 2006/2007 production season. Competing for awards were 23 feature films, 32 documentaries, and 78 experimental, short, and animation films (including a tribute to video artist Lisl Ponger). For many Diagonale visitors, however, the eight sidebar “Specials” were the icing on the festival cake. Cineastes flocked to the retrospective tribute honoring veteran Austrian photographer and cinematographer Wolf Suschitzky. The Austrian Film Archive saluted Vienna’s legendary cinephile-historian-collector Herbert Holba (1932-1994). The Austrian Film Museum presented “Stoffwechsel,” or “How Films Beget Films” in a film-archeological context. The “Carte Blanche for Constantin Wulff” honored a former codirector of the Diagonale with a personal selection of five politically oriented documentaries. Other Specials focused on the Early Films of Austrian director Florian Flicker, “Rookie Movies” by students at the Vienna Film Academy, winners of the recent “Shorts on Screen” contest, and “Sehstationen” – six documentaries made for TV Channel ORF/3sat.

Another attractive sidebar, “Festival in Dialogue,” spotlighted films programmed at four neighboring film festivals: Crossing Europe in Linz, DokMa in Malibor (Slovenia), New Crowned Hope in Vienna, and Vienna Independent Shorts. Christine Dollhofer, formerly a Diagonale codirector and now the director of the Crossing Europe festival, with a focus on films from CentEast countries, was honored with the festival’s Promotional Award for Cinematic Art. On hand with four Linz films in her Diagonale program – among them Teona Mitevska’s Kako ubiv svetec (How I Killed a Saint) (Macedonia, 2004) – Dollhofer promoted Linz’s forthcoming status as European Cultural Capital in 2009. As for the extraordinary New Crowned Hope series, this collection of seven films by directors from Asia, Africa, and Latin America was originally developed from an Austrian film fund especially initiated for the 2006 Mozart Year. The series included films that critics are still raving about on the international festival circuit, among them Bahman Ghobadi’s Niwemang (Half Moon) (Iran), Garin Nugroho Opera Jawa (Indonesia), Tsai Ming-Liang’s Hei yan quan (I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) (Taiwan), and Paz Encina’s Hamaca Paraguaya (Paraguayan Hammock) (Paraguay).

Jakob M. Erwa’s Heile Welt (Blessed World) was awarded Best Austrian Feature Film. The fates of four youths are anything but blessed in their reckless summer search for identity apart from parental jurisdiction and social acceptance. This free-flowing coming-of-age film, in which Erwa cast nonprofessionals in key roles, depicts the uncertainty of kids as they wrestle mostly with themselves during a day and night and day after that’s marked by aggression and violence.

The Thomas Pluch Screenplay Award went to Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters), a psychological thriller offering a different bent on the Holocaust theme. Set in the Sachsenhausen prison camp during the last years of the Second World War, the focus in The Counterfeiters is on an opposing pair of practiced counterfeiters, one a thief with principles and the other a political idealist, in a tug-of-war for moral principles. A Diagonale Award for Cinematography went to Bernhard Keller, cameraman on Barbara Albert’s Fallen (Falling). A light comedy about the faded dreams of five former high-school girlfriends – the women are now in their early thirties – their meeting at a hometown funeral triggers memories and questions their idealistic resolves of the past.

Peter Schreiner’s Bellavista was awarded Best Austrian Documentary. A quiet film about three unusual women – Giuliana, Bernadina, Erminja – who work in the Bellavista hotel in Sappada in the Italian Tirol. Shot over the four seasons in black-and-white, Bellavista is a fascinating documentary on several accounts. Giuliana Pachner’s interest in “Plodarisch,” a German dialect spoken in this area, underscores how quickly another language is fading into history. At times, when Bernadina and Erminja, the elderly members of the family, discuss the past, subtitles in German have to added for the audience to understand exactly what they are saying, let alone to fathom their thoughts.

Two documentaries on film classics were also standouts. Srdjan Knezevic’s Die Brücke der Verständigung (Bridging Minds) (Austria/Bosnia&Hercegovina) recounts the difficulties in the making of Helmut Käutner’s Die Letzte Brücke (The Last Bridge) (1954), an Austrian-Yugoslav-West German coproduction under the aegis of Columbia Pictures that received a special award at Cannes together with an honorable mention to actress Maria Schell for her remarkable performance. The insightful interviews alone with many professionals associated with that milestone production – save for the late Helmut Käutner (1908-1980) and Maria Schell (1926-2005) – make Knezevic’s Bridging Minds must viewing by the committed cineaste. As the story goes, it took the special intervention of Marshall Tito himself to permit the release of the independently produced The Last Bridge in Yugoslavia over the objections of many powerful critics, politicians, and ex-partisans. Several excerpts from the original film add to the power of narrative.
By the same token, Frederick Baker’s Shadowing the Third Man (UK/Austria) scores as a breathtaking documentary on the making of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (UK, 1949), awarded the Golden Palm at the 1949 Cannes film festival. Voted the top British Film of All Time by critics and professionals, and still honored with “Third Man Tours” in today’s Vienna, the making of the film is minutely recounted by the Austrian-British documentarist with the help of director Guy Hamilton and script supervisor Angela Allen, both assistants to Sir Carol Reed on The Third Man. Archival interviews with screenwriter Graham Greene and actors Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton, to name just the primary sources, add to the overall enjoyment of reliving one of the great films in cinema history.

Mike Hodges’s Get Carter (UK, 1971), voted 16th place on the British Films of All Time, owes much of its cult status to Austrian cinematographer Wolf Suschitzky. A crime thriller set in Newcastle, Get Carter stars Michael Caine as a hitman without scruples who braves the odds to avenge the murder of his gangster brother. Filmed almost entirely on location, the chilling realism of the film benefits from Suschitzky’s images of the streets and docks and bars in rundown Newcastle, where anything goes so long as you don’t get caught. Get Carter is often cited as a forerunner of a new genre of crime thriller and hard-boiled Lee Marvin roles – to say nothing of reportedly being Michael Caine’s all-time favorite film role.

Awards

Diagonale Main Award – Feature Film
Heile Welt (Blessed World), dir Jakob M. Erwa
Diagonale Main Award – Documentary Film
Bellavista, dir Peter Schreiner
City of Graz Award for Innovative Cinema – ex aequo
erase remake, dir Jan Machacek, Martin Siewert
visibility of interim~, dir Manuel Knapp

Graz-Seckau Diocese Church Award
Bilder aus dem Tagebuch eines Wartenden (Images from the Diary of Someone Waiting), dir Judith Zdesar
Land Steiermark Youth Jury Award for Best New Generation Film
“Der Kärntner spricht Deutsch” (“Kärtner People Speak German”) dir Andrina Mracnikar
Special Mentions:
Arbeit 2.0. (Work 2.0.), dir Clemens Kogler
Ich muss dir was sagen (I Have to Tell You Something), dir Martin Nguyen

Award for Cinematography – ex aequo
Bernhard Keller, Fallen (Falling), dir Barbara Albert
Jo Molitoris, Kurz davor ist es passiert (It Happened Just Before), dir Anja Salomonowitz
Award for Editing / Feature Film
Oliver Neumann, Immer nie am Meer (Forever Never Anywhere), dir Antonin Svoboda
Award for Editing / Documentary Film
Alarich Lenz, Meine liebe Republik (My Dear Republic), dir Elisabeth Scharang

Audience Award
Vienna’s Lost Daughters, dir Mirjam Unger
VAM Producer Award for Innovative Production
Allegro Film, In 3 Tagen bist du tot (Three Days and You’re Dead), dir Andreas Prochaska
ORF Award for Best TV Treatment
Running Sushi, dir Ulla Neuwirther

Carl Mayer Screenplay Award
Main Prize
Thomas Reider, Stillleben
Grant Prize
Christoph Hochenbichler, Josef Pallwein-Prettner, Fünf Leben

Thomas Pluch Screenplay Award
Stefan Ruzowitzky, Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters), dir Stefan Ruzowitzky
Thomas Pluch Screenplay Grant Awards
Marie Kreutzer, White Box, dir Marie Kreutzer
Christoph Grissemann, Dirk Stermann, Heinz Strunk, Antonin Svoboda, Jörg Kalt, Immer nie am Meer (Forever Never Anywhere), dir Antonin Svoboda

Promotional Award for Cinema Art
Christine Dollhofer, director, Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz
Grant Award for Cinema Art – ex aequo
Michaela Schwentner
Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel