Festival Films A-Z

Extrafilm
Lukas Stepanik
Schlösselgasse 22/6
1080 Vienna
Austria
Tel.: +43 1 581 78 96
Fax: +43 1 971 25 49

E-Mail: extrafilm@chello.at
Marcus J. Carney
Tel.: +43 699 181 769 64
E-Mail: carney@chello.at

Rolf Orthel
Schlösselgasse 22/6
1080 Wien
Österreich
Tel.: +43 1 58 17 856
Fax: +43 1 97 12 549

Marcus J. Carney, Ludwig Loekinger

Marcus J. Carney, Georg Tschurtschenthaler

Austrian Film Commission
Martin Schweighofer
Stiftgasse 6
1070 Wien
Österreich
Tel.: +43 1 52 63 323
Fax: +43 1 52 66801
E-Mail: office@afc.at
Internet: www.austrianfilm.com

filmladen GmbH
Mariahilfer Straße 58/7
A-1070 Wien
Tel.: +43 1 523 43 62-0
Fax: +43 1 526 47 49
E-Mail: office@filmladen.at

Synopsis

The End of the Neubacher Project tells the story of the filmmaker Marcus J. Carney and his mother's family. At the outset, all characters portrayed seem to be mostly healthy, sometimes neurotic members of an average family. The filmmaker tries to come to terms with the family's Nazi past, and step by step he encounters greater entanglements and deeper levels of denial. The main relationship in the film develops between the filmmaker and his mother, who is diagnosed with cancer during the main shoot.

With its stunning use of stills from the family archives and 8mm footage, the film may rightly be called an epic home movie. By adding to this private archive material the ample public material about Carney's forebears in the Vienna archives, the director shows us a shifting world in which the boundaries between private and public dissolve. This quality of the film is truly epic. Deftly handling the montage of a great deal of gut-wrenching imagery, Carney explores the trauma of his own typical Austrian family, a family defined as much by its atavistic love of hunting as it is by its feeling of guilt for the whole nation?s involvement in National Socialism. The broken centre of this family can be found in its incapacity to mourn. This incapacity to mourn is so pervasive that it kills.

The film was eight years in the making. Carney's grandmother and mother, embodiments of the family's history, both died during production. As we witness these troubled women pass through the agony of their final illnesses, we discover to what extent they are still unable to confront the complicity of their whole family in running the machinery of the Austrian National Socialist state. The grandmother has never overcome her denial as a strategy of survival, and the more Carney finds out about her, the more shattered his image of her becomes, affecting even his love. The mother was torn between acknowledging the historical facts, hesitating to accept her parents? guilt-laden involvement, and her innocent wish to love these parents. This destroyed her life - and indirectly threatens that of the filmmaker.

Biography

Wolfskinder (1995), Istvan, Anton und die drei Schwestern (1997), Sieben Richtungen (1998), Schaf (1999), Air Square (2003), The End of the Neubacher Project (2007)

Filmography

Wolfskinder (1995), Istvan, Anton und die drei Schwestern (1997), Sieben Richtungen (1998), Schaf (1999), Air Square (2003), The End of the Neubacher Project (2007)

Dates

07

02.10.2007

15:45

Filmhaus