07/09/2026 - VENICE 2026: The Austrian director delves into the symbolism and the historical relevance of his feature debut, based loosely on his personal life

It’s not easy for a young boy, in the late 1990s, to discover that his father is in hospital with AIDS, while he is stigmatised for this not only by the whole mountain village, but also by his best friend. Manuel Wetscher, the Tyrolean-born director of the Venice Orizzonti title Eklipse, plucked parts of this story right out of his own biography. With his visually stunning, slow-burning drama, he explores themes of friendship, loyalty and emotional intimacy.

Cineuropa: You’ve taken up the theme of your father for what is essentially the third time – first with the short films Four Seasons and Richard, and now with Eklipse. Is there something therapeutic about that?
Manuel Wetscher: Maybe. I think I’ve been working my way towards this project. With each film, the process takes me somewhere different. For me, it’s about engaging with my own material and exploring how it can be used artistically. These personal experiences of mine – not just those of my father – and this world that I know become part of a process.

Your father died in 1993, but you set the story in 1999, which was also when a quantum leap was made in terms of AIDS research and treatment. What changed for you by setting the story later?
It was extremely important for us to realise that if we had set the film in 1993, medical science wouldn’t have been advanced enough. The father would most likely have died. The film’s narrative has always focused on the boys, their friendship and what that triggers between them. In the end, it’s left open to interpretation what happens to the father. It was important to me to be historically authentic, and to address the fact that medical progress doesn’t always keep pace with knowledge about a disease or with how society deals with it.

The film takes a few steps back and turns AIDS into a horror story again. It does this very powerfully through visual symbolism, such as when it uses fluids and blood. Was that in the script from the start?
Without that in the script, we wouldn’t have been able to stage it that way, to delve so deeply into the shit and the milk. That’s a very clear metaphor. The mastitis, the syringe and the mosquito bite are all elements that create resonance.

Moritz Hohlrieder plays the boy with the sick father. Did you give him any specific notes, or did he find that place of trauma and sadness on his own?
He did ask me specifically at times how I was feeling back then or how I dealt with certain things. But he isn’t me. He’s playing this character, and I can give him certain tools to work with. We also had to differentiate very precisely between sadness and melancholy. He asked me, “Am I more sad or more melancholic?” And then I said: “A little sad,” on a scale of one to ten. Sometimes we’d go to plus two or minus two. That’s how we found our common language.

You didn’t find out what your father died of until ten years later; Tomy finds out sooner. Is that wishful thinking on your part, reflected in the film?
Perhaps the dialogue between the mother and Tomy is kind of wishful thinking. It offers a certain kind of possibility for how one might be able to take up this conversation. I also had my own conversation with my mother, albeit later on and in a different form. This gives Tomy a wonderful opportunity to reflect on what’s important in life: love and intimacy, and not letting anything else get in the way.