I AM HERE! in competition: Ludwig Wüst from Rotterdam to Graz

In reference to Ludwig Wüst's current feature film I AM HERE! (AT 2023), which recently celebrated its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival and will be shown in Graz as an Austrian premiere, the Diagonale will exclusively and uniquely show Wüst's filmic convolute ABC (AT 2023) - a journey through 25 years of film work, the alphabet of the independent solitaire and border crosser. After Wüst's special Theater-, Kino-, Holzarbeit at Diagonale'19, the double ABC and I AM HERE! allow further unique explorations in the filmmaker's tightly branching thematic as well as motivic mole-hole system. On Festival Friday, both films will be screened one after the other, framed by in-depth conversations with Ludwig Wüst.

ABC is a journey through twenty-five years of film work, a visual alphabet of sorts that tells of thematic diversity in the three primary colors. A tells of Ludwig Wüst’s first journey to Egypt. A country where his desire to become a filmmaker was born when these unplanned recordings were shot. B is concerned with Wüst’s major theme in life: friendship. C is a poetic condensation on the issue of human existence. ABC are three films that have now come into the world.

„ About three years ago, during the first Corona lockdown, I began to sift through filmic fragments in my archive that had been lying dormant for many years, waiting to be exploited. In the process, I came across my very first video works, made in 1999 in Cairo and the Egyptian desert in preparation for my debut film Egyptian Eclipse. Over the course of the last twenty years, this material has led to several edited versions, which have never been published by me until now. A second unpublished film fragment, very important to me personally, had the working title Cain & Abel; it was made with friends in a quarry near Gießhübl in the summer of 2018 and has since been waiting to be realized as a feature-length film. When I saw the last cut, I knew: The film is finished! Thus a second short film work was completed. In the summer of 2021, encouraged by my colleague Gudrun Fürlinger, I began to work with analog film. I took a Super8 camera and went to Bavaria to my home village. In these summer days I made my first analog recordings, a very important moment for me, similar to the time when I started my cinematic work in 1998 and made video recordings of my home village and my father's house with my first MiniDV cam. These first digital recordings from that time have been lost in the course of time. The analog Super8 images shot now will remain."
Director's Statement on ABC

"Ludwig Wüst is an edgy writer aka performer aka carpenter aka director. And at the same time an incredible visionary, with a hand on the work."
Barbara Wurm, Diagonale'19 Catalog



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