21/06/2005

Jörg Kalt's Crash Test Dummies [+see also:
trailer
film profile], recently screened in Paris on the final night of the Austrian Film Festival and currently presented at the Trencianske Teplice International Film Festival (17-25 June), is about to be shown in the 'Another View' section of the 40th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (as will Darwin's Nightmare).

The script, distinguished at the Diagonale Festival, starts with a case of petty car theft which brings a young Romanian couple, Ana and Nicolae (Maria Popistasu and Bogdan Dumitrache), to Vienna just a few days before the recent enlargement ceremony for the EU. They end up stuck there, with no money, they argue and separate for a while, allowing their destinies to intertwine with those of local people: a nice watchman ashamed of his job, his permanently stoned roommate who earns her money by testing pills and sitting crash tests. Like Ana and Nicolae, all the characters are in limbo, wandering, stuck in a transitory space , metaphorically and literally (as the final scene cleverly demonstrates).
The film, which Jörg Kalt describes as a story of cars and cows (cf. ‘Making of’ published in Cineuropa), was initially meant to be a love story, but, as the director confessed when Cineuropa met him in Paris, 'you never know in advance the direction things can take.' What the film shows is precisely that sometimes, unexpectedly, life can even bring us together...The characters' criss-crossing and the recurrent motifs become reassuring coincidences. Besides, what brings them together are actually their weaknesses —and their weakness for silly little objects, like the speaking watch...—, on which the director dwells benevolently, with a refreshing sense of the absurd.

Crash Test Dummies was produced by Amour Fou and Icon Film, and supported by the Austrian Film Institute, the ORF, and several regional funds. Autlook Films handles international sales.

This feature is one of the eight Austrian (co-)productions presented in Karlovy Vary, alongside Fremde Haut (Unveiled) by Angelina Maccarone (Competition), Neue Welt (New World) by Paul Rosdy (documentary competition), Ragin by Kirill Serebrennikov and Dallas Among Us by Adrian Robert Pejo (East of the West competition).

(Translated from French)