Part One of Austrian director Axel Corti's magnificent 'Where To And Back' trilogy opens in Vienna on the morning after Kristallnacht, with a suddenly orphaned Austrian boy joining the ranks of other Jewish refugees in their mad dash back and forth across Europe in the months just prior to and following Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. Corti's dramatic realism (seamlessly integrating archival footage alongside his actors) brings to life all the fear and energy of desperate times, offering a vivid depiction of a people in transit, and examining larger issues of anti-Semitism and cultural exile from an urgent but intimate perspective. The script by Georg Stefan Troeller was clearly written from firsthand experience; nothing in it is black and white except the confusion of the displaced population, never more than one step ahead of persecution and death. It's a sensitive, powerful film, and a moving prelude to a much larger tale of flight and survival.
(Made originally for Austrian television, but I was fortunate to catch the entire trilogy on the big screen at Wheeler Auditorium on the Berkeley campus, back in 1987.)
(Made originally for Austrian television, but I was fortunate to catch the entire trilogy on the big screen at Wheeler Auditorium on the Berkeley campus, back in 1987.)
