Fair Wind - Notes from a Traveller: screening

Austrian filmmaker Bernadette Weigel’s multi-award winning new documentary Fair Wind – Notes From A Traveller is at the Austrian Cultural Forum this 20 February for a one-off special screening. Festooned with awards for Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Documentary Sound Design, and indeed the Jury's Grand Prize at the Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film 2013, it’s a beautiful, wistful story of a filmmaker’s 2010 journey down the Danube from Austria into the heart of Eastern Europe.

Beginning in Weigel’s home town of Vienna, this filmic travelogue meanders its way into the Eurasian heartland by means of trains, fishing boats and a Bulgarian cargo ship, stopping over with Roma gypsies, Moldavian nuns and Eid festivities in Baku, before ending on the Kazakh shores of the Caspian Sea when the filmmaker breaks her leg. Entirely shot on a handheld super 8mm camera (first manufactured by Kodak in 1965), the visuals combine the mystique of a long-lost cinefilm with the intimate, handmade feel of a personal travelogue.

The plot is loose, and Weigel only infrequently (with the use of intertitles) tells viewers where they are – a deliberately disorientating effect which she calls ‘an invitation to the audience to make their own experiences and embark on their own journeys’. There’s plenty of opportunity to do so. Overlaid with an eerily beautiful asynchronous soundtrack of music and ambient noise, each scene opens up multiplexes of feeling.

This is Weigel’s directorial debut, though she bears the considerable pedigree of having worked alongside Michael Haneke on his internationally critically acclaimed “Das Weiße Band” (The White Band) in 2011. We predict huge success for her – so be sure to catch her while she’s on the rise.

Click here to read more and view the trailer.