Directing
Anja isn't making any progress. Her thesis and her personal life are both coming to nothing; an existential crisis lurks behind her lack of motivation. When her family gathers for her grandmother's funeral in Holland, she escapes to the seaside. Walking along the beach, she experiences her loneliness more intensely than ever before: a journey toward self-discovery begins.
The inner lives of six people are explored. Each has a connection to the Viennese subway station Schottentor.
Frau Maria is the last employee of Stastny Fabrics, a shop in the former textile district in the heart of Vienna. While she prepares bales of fabric for the clearance sale in premises that have gone unchanged for decades, she tells of better times, when business flourished and work was a pleasure. She removes the company nameplate and locks the shop for the last time: With it a part of Vienna’s Jewish history disappears.
Sternfeld is sent by a lawyer's office to Taipei to investigate a Compact Disc pirating operation and to document the sales of said CDs on video. He fails to make contact with his informant and ends up wandering aimlessly through the city. His repeated visits to a prostitute do nothing to reduce his feelings of alienation. Only when he meets Chang do his perceptions begin to change.
Dr. H. owns a multi-million-dollar property in the heart of Vienna. He inherited it from his aunt, who wasn’t really his aunt. Dr. H. is melancholy and wouldn’t mind putting an end to his life, if it weren’t for his brother B., who isn’t really his brother. Dr. H. tells how, with the help of a veterinarian, he brought B. out of a coma resulting from cardiac arrest, and how B. helped him get the building from his so-called aunt. Dr. H. has set up a charitable foundation that will begin operations after he dies. The filmmaker decides to intervene.
Taiwan and Austria, two countries on two different continents, two cultures. Two dance ensembles separated by many differences and yet their members speak the same language. The director spent two years with his camera, attending dance rehearsals of the Vienna State Ballet and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from Taiwan. He has captured how small gestures, steps and figures create a performance that we will not see in the end and his film shows more than just the final work. We can see a living matter that is being squeezed and shaped into an ideal form under the guidance of a choreographer. Art is like life and life is like art.
