So German!
“This impressively handled if rather atypical biopic, Austria’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, is psychologically insightful and packs a serious emotional wallop.
“Jewish Austrian author and playwright Stefan Zweig was, alongside Thomas Mann, the most-read German-language author of the 1920s. Exiled from his homeland in 1934, yet unwilling to condemn the political forces that turfed him out of tumultuous preWar Europe, Zweig and his dedicated wife Lotte ricocheted from the U.K. and around the Americas, but were never at ease away from Austria.
“Director Maria Schrader doesn’t try to dramatize Zweig at work writing. Instead, she focuses on the author’s interactions with others – some purely ceremonial, others more intimate, all of them
revealing – to help suggest something about both his character and his slowly decaying sense of place in the world. In exile, his body might be safe but his mind keeps wandering back to a place he knows is being erased from the map.”
– The Hollywood Reporter
(106 min. Austria 2016. In German with some Portuguese, Spanish & French with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Cinemascope.)
The German Language Film Festival is presented by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Embassy of Switzerland and the Embassy of Austria in Canada.
