10th edition CIFF – 10-14 April 2024

Night of a 1000 Hours (Die Nacht der Tausend Stunden) (2017 Feature Film)

Virgil Widrich | Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg | 2016 | 92 min | German | e.s.

Hermann Ullich died in a bunker in World War II. Or did he? Why do all the dead relatives of the industrialist appear on this winter's night in the huge family home? Agatha Christie would love this Austrian whodunnit, in which skeletons from the nation’s past also come out of the cupboard.

Just before mother is to transfer the family business and the accompanying imposing mansion to her son, she collapses. This is fortunate for her other son because he is in danger of losing out owing to his far-right sympathies. Yet her death turns out to be not as final as hoped; as she signs her will a little later, other dead relatives appear. Everyone apart from Hermann Ullich, the head of the family, who died in 1945 in Vienna in a bombing raid. At least, that’s what people thought. During a long night, more and more indications emerge that history actually took a very different course.

Virgil Widrich does not allow himself to be hemmed in by something as banal as reality in this lighthearted murder mystery. Dead people walk into the room as if they have never been away. How passé is the past?, the film seems to ask. There are certainly a couple of old political ghosts that have certainly not yet come to rest.

Place: CINEMA 4

Date: 8 April 2017

Time: 19:00

Duration: 1:14

Place: CINEMA 4

Date: 9 April 2017

Time: 15:15

Duration: 1:12

Year in
Festival

2017

Director

Virgil Widrich

Camera

Christian Berger

Cast

Laurence Rupp
Amira Casar
Barbara Petritsch
Elisabeth Rath
Linde Prelog
Johann Adam Oest
Lukas Miko

Country

Austria
Belgium
Netherlands
Luxembourg

Editor

Pia Dumont

Language

German

Length

92 min

Music

Siegfried Friedrich

Producer

Alexander Dumreicher Ivanceanu
Bady Minck
Raphael Barth / Golden Girls Filmproduktion & Filmservices

Production Company

Amour Fou
Minotaurus Film
Golden Girls Filmproduktion & Filmservices
KeyFilm

Production Design

Christina Schaffer

Sales

Picture Tree International

Scenario

Virgil Widrich

Sound Design

Michel Schillings

Year of Production

2016

Virgil WIDRICH (1967, Austria) created his first film project, a documentary about his family, at age thirteen. In 2000, his feature film Heller als der Mond, selected for the IFFR Tiger Awards Competition, premiered at IFFR. A year later, his short film Copy Shop was nominated for an Oscar. Widrich is a professor of Art and Science at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Night of a 1000 Hours (2016) is his first feature film since Heller als der Mond.

 

Filmography

(selection) Auch Farbe kann träumen (1981, short), Monster in Salzburg (1982, short), Vom Geist der Zeit (1985), tx-transform (1998, short), Heller als der Mond (2000), Copy Shop (2001, short), Fast Film (2003, short), Make/Real (2010, short), Warning Triangle (2011, short), Back Track (2015, short), Die Nacht der Tausend Stunden/Night of a 1000 Hours (2016)