Sitzfleisch

When a young Austrian filmmaker decided to spend her summer vacation with her brother and grandparents, she had no idea how much their trip from Vienna to Norway's North Cape would tell her about the two 70-somethings' long marriage. The film's light-hearted tone captures the comical habits of the two elderly tourists, whose main concern is that they may have to part with their information brochures or their favorite salami beckoning to them from its allotted place in their carefully packed luggage. Whenever they are forced to leave the safe bubble of their comfortable car, they do so reservedly and without any desire to interact with the local population. Structured as a light-hearted road movie, Lisa Weber's film is an incisive study of a relationship deformed by decades of cohabitation. This small-scale but very distinctive film shows how our disappointment from an annoyingly ordinary goal can be compensated by the beauty of the journey that leads there – but not everyone wants to let this beauty in. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)