The film portrays René Rupnik, a 50-year-old math teacher who lives with his elderly mother, barricaded behind the heaps of trash, paper and newspapers he has amassed on the street over decades of hoarding. In his fantasies, the obsessive bosom expert lives together with Senta Berger, the famous Viennese actress he has worshipped for decades. He has seen all her films, collected all her photos. He only met her once, outside Vienna's Burgtheater, where he attended her show fifty times. With his new binoculars in the standing room area.
Austria 1997 | 60 min | German | Beta SP
Director: Ulrich Seidl | Producer: Erich Lackner | Screenplay: Ulrich Seidl | Camera: Heinz Brandner, Jerzy Palacz, Hans Selikovsky, Peter Zeitlinger | Sound: Ekkehart Baumung | Editing and Music: Walter Andreas Christen | Research and Assistant director: Veronika Franz | Production manager: Max Linder | Co-producer: Esther von Messel | Cast: René Rupnik
Production company: LOTUS FILM GmbH | Mollardgasse 85a, Stiege 1 | 1060 Vienna, Austria
T +43 1 7863387 | F +43 1 7863387 - 11 | E office@lotus-film.at | www.lotus-film.at
World sales: Coproduction Office | 24, rue Lamartine | 75009 Paris, France
T +33 1 56026000 | F +33 1 56026001 | E sales@coproductionoffice.eu | www.coproductionoffice.eu
"It all started with Pictures at an Exhibition. Since then, so for over twenty years, René Rupnik has kept turning up in my life. Privately, such as when years ago he suddenly fled from the hospital where he was being treated for cancer to convince me to drive with him immediately to Monaco to finally break the bank with a system that he, a mathematician, had devised. Or professionally, such as when, alongside Maria Hofstätter in the Our Father scene in PARADISE: Faith he left an indelible impression. René Rupnik may strike some as a gramp, some may see him as a hoarder, an eccentric. For me he is someone who has chosen freedom. He lives without money and without social security, he lives without a coat, holed up with his OCD in his apartment - behind his 'intellectual barricade', as he affectionately calls the tons of newspapers that he has collected and piled up over the years. René lives in his own tailor-made emotional and mental fantasy world from which he interprets reality. As a bosom fetichist in The Bosom Friend he assembles like Frankenstein the physically ideal woman, thereby combining various fantasies, desires and abysses that should come as no surprise to us men." - Ulrich Seidl
Festivals
Kommunalkino Bremen, Munich International Filmwoche, Kulturforum/Bucharest, Cineteca Nacional/Mexico, Motovun FF, Thessaloniki IFF, New Horizons IFF, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam IDFAr, Duisburger/THEN Duisburg/ Filmwoche, IFF Rotterdam
Publication: Paul Poet in Ray: JPG
Pressphotos: 15x10cm / 300dpi / jpg / ca. 400kb
© Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion
