Paul-Julien Robert: My Fathers, My Mother and Me
German title: Meine Keine Familie.
The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film: Deep inside this film lies hidden a drama which slowly and imperceptibly unfolds enveloping the actors of this family and non-family story. The filmmaker Paul-Julien Robert launches a personal investigation into the identity of his father, but also into his own childhood. A childhood that is far from ordinary – for he was born and raised in a commune, which from the beginning of the 1970s to the late 80s came to be the largest free commune in Europe. It was created by the legendary avantgarde Austrian artist Otto Mühl, and at it’s height it was inhabited with more than 600 people from all over Europe. All of them were drawn there by the ideals of absolute freedom, to live a life based on the principles of “self-expression, communal property, free sexuality, joint labour, collective upbringing of children and direct democracy.”
Within this utopia, among large groups of carefree and joyful children we discover Paul-Julien Robert, thanks to archival footage for which he obtained exclusive permission to show publicly for the first time. This enables him to face a part of his forgotten and repressed childbood memories. The basis of the film is a pain-staking questioning of memory, an analysis of archival images and a dramatic confrontation of the filmmaker first with his own mother, and then a succession of ‘fathers’ and playmates from one of the ‘freest’ kindergardens in Europe.
This film represents an exclusive, shocking and disturbing creation of two dedicated masters of the cinematic art: Paul-Julien Robert, an engaged, courageous, analytical and emotional author and his editor Oliver Neumann, who builds the dramaturgy of this investigation constructing it into a tense drama of extraordinary gradation and rhythm. The two come together to create a film of superior achievement, which, last year in London, won them one of the most prestigous awards in the world of documentary cinema, one that carries the name of the legendary John Grierson.
Austria, 2012, 93 mins.
