Dichter zu Gast – Blick ins innere Österreich
Salzburg 43 – Zeugnisse der Infamie

In German

In collaboration with Das Kino

Nina Gladitz: Zeit des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (Germany, 1982)

Following the film screening there will be a discussion with Nina Gladitz, Rosa Gitta Martl, Gert Kerschbaumer and Claudio Magris

CAST

Nina Gladitz, Rosa Gitta Martl, Gert Kerschbaumer, Claudio Magris

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

In an interview published in the magazine of the Frankfurter Rundschau in 2002, the German filmmaker and photographer Leni Riefenstahl claimed that she “saw all the gypsies that were in Tiefland again after the war. Nothing happened to a single one of them”. In fact, almost none of the 51 Sinti who were engaged by Leni Riefenstahl for the shooting of her film from the Salzburg internment camp in the early 1940s survived their subsequent deportation to the concentration camps. At the beginning of the 1980s, Nina Gladitz’s film Zeit des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (Time of Silence and Darkness) introduced a broad public to the fate of the bit players used by Leni Riefenstahl. The Salzburg historian Gert Kerschbaumer has documented the names and fates of 245 Sinti children, women and men that were interned on the edge of the Mozart and Festival town. Among their descendants is Rosa Gitta Martl, writer and activist.

Three movies provide the point of departure for an exploration of turning points in Austrian history which also became decisive in the biography of people whose lives were changed by historical events – set on tracks that lead into the present. Claudio Magris, who in his work has proven to be an obsessive tracker of such changes that large-scale history effects in the lives of individuals, meets Austrian artists and scientists on three evenings and goes on a journey with them: Vienna, Linz and Salzburg are the regions that lead us into the country’s innermost.