It’s the early 1950s and little Franzi is growing up in the small Austrian town of Judenburg. Her oppressive family home is dominated by her feverish and mentally ill father, who is rigid and unpredictable. Her father, who regularly delivers halves of pork for the butcher, spent several years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Algeria and Syria – a period which he partly glorifies but which still also haunts him. Franzi immerses herself in this world by looking at an abundance of beguiling yet disturbing photographs taken at the time by her father. Her own childish fantasy realm of fairy tales and picture books soon intermingle with nightmares as reality merges with imagination, war, horror and beauty.
Cinematography
Mikesch's lush 35mm turns slaughterhouse grime into painterly dread.
Direction
Elfi Mikesch weaves fever, fantasy and documentary footage into one suffocating breath.
Director
Elfi Mikesch
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Director Elfi Mikesch based much of the film on her own childhood in postwar Austria; her father was also a Legionnaire.
The film uses actual vintage photographs from the French Foreign Legion's North African campaigns, which Mikesch's father brought home. These real documents of colonial violence become the raw material of a daughter's inherited trauma.
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