Welcome in Vienna – Part 1 : God does not believe in us anymore / Wohin und zurück – Teil 1: An uns glaubt Gott nicht mehr

Vienna 1938: after Crystal Night and the murder of his father by the Nazis, Jewish teenager Ferry Tobler flees Austria. He ends up in Prague, where he meets Gandhi, an anti-Nazi German soldier who has escaped from Dachau, and Alea, a young Czech women in charge of caring for refugees. They make their way to Paris, where because they have no papers, they are interned by the French authorities in a holding camp at Saint-Just-en-Chaussée.

“Welcome in Vienna is less a saga in three episodes than the assemblage of three “fragments” taken from a kind of imaginary fresco and whose order is dictated only by which chronology (of the stories, of their filming). In short, the three films could be seen not only separately, but even out of “order”, without spoiling either comprehension or viewing pleasure. The first film describes the urgency and heartbreak of departure, via a new awareness, and then an amorous initiation. Each film has its key location, its microcosm: here it is a French camp where immigrants are held.” N. T. Binh, Positif, mars 1987

“In his direction, using black and white and a square format, and at times inserting archive footage, although always in correlation with the story,  Axel Corti finds the right tonality somewhere between modern sleekness and stylization: faithful to the story and its characters, but not averse to the beauty of wandering aimlessly in the snow to the sound of Schubert, or the ellipse of an embrace, segueing from a shot of a man and woman fording a river bare-chested between enemy lines, and a shot of the same two waking up in the morning in the same bed.”  Serge Kaganski, lesinrocks.com, November 2011