HALBE WELT / THE HALF WORLD

THE HALF WORLD (RETRO)

HALBE WELT / THE HALF WORLD

Director: Florian Flicker
Feature film | Austria | 1993
83 min | Stereo PCM

57th Hof International Film Festival
2023
Retrospective Maria Schrader

HALF WORLD, 6 a.m.: Sirens wail. The streets empty. Windows are blacked out. People flee underground. – The sirens die down. Silence. Above the lifeless city, the sun rises and casts its deadly light over HALF WORLD. 12 hours later: sunset, all-clear siren, life begins. – Good night.

The film shows different survival techniques in an artificial world: action, love, sex, violence. In the metropolises of HALF WORLD, a culture of different languages and ways of life proliferates. Katz, a dealer, roams around selling old postcards of a nature long since decayed.

Herzog stands on the roof of his house every morning with a stopwatch, trying to bear the sunrise. “The whites” have a monopoly on the past and produce electronic illusions for an invisible elite by means of old nature photographs. “The blacks” seize these illusion machines and manipulate them. And in Sunny’s day bar, this HALF WORLD meets. A mixture of science fiction and eco-thriller.

With Dani Levy, Goran Rebic, Maria Schrader, Mercedes Echerer, Rainer Egger

Screenplay Florian Flicker, Michael Sturminger, Cinematography Jerzy Palacz, Editing Bernhard Weirather, Production design Renate Martin, Andreas Donhauser, Costume design Anette Schröder, Music Lonesome Andi Haller Band