- Occupation
Director - Country
Austria
Glawogger Michael
Working Man's Death
In the working class dying out? Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible? Where can we still find it in the 21st century? Workingman`s Death follows the trail of the HEROES in illegal mines in the Ukraine, sniffs out GHOSTS among the sulfur workers in Indonesia, finds itself face to face with LIONS at a slaughterhause in Nigeria, mingles with BROTHERS as they cut a huge oil tanker into pieces in Pakistan, and joins Chinese steel workers in hoping for a glorious FUTURE.
State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters
It wasn‘t the goal to make just a report on Austria but to contribute to a discussion. Turn the spectator into another debater. The moving picture of the group of four directors tries to render the social situation, economic factors and the ideology mixtures that naturally outline the present life without significant concessions. The document is not a critic analysis of Austrian political crises, which could be a symptom of western-european standards. It is rather its statement, which is more less a consequence of sociological reckoned on practical life of presentation of representative types. Barbara Albert portraitured working women, single mothers. A cashier in a supermarket, a worker at an endless band in a factory, a convinced elector for the Freedom a woman of Turkish nationality and an unemployed artist of action. The director catches them in brief moments of everyday life however even from there we can read what the political conviction grows from. Michael Glawogger set off by himself. During three weeks he crossed Austria hitchhiking. With a small camera he was getting in to random drivers. The journey mainly followed the state border. The most often picture there is a driver with the countryside running away behind the window. The sentence fragments are glued together as a mosaic of views and opinions on the government, opposition, the monarch and the European Union, on immigrants. Ulrich Seidl. The most ordinary Austrians as well, fascinate the director of controversial movie Psí dny (Dog days) presented in Czech cinemas, the intimacy of their stereotype lives. He chose one of the monotonous motives for his part of the collective document. - A notorious complainer, who spends his life writing letters to authorities and an elderly couple, who view themselves surrounded with a bunch of foreigners, as the country and tradition savers. Michael Strumminger followed a prominent telecast and peaked into two different living rooms. He found there children and their grandparents - two groups not interested in politics. Not yet and not any more. However, there is a shadow on them as well. The bipolarity tension between politics and non-politics follows the whole film, which only summaries, points and in places condensed way popularize the endless discussion about the state of public affairs. The bearers of different ideas are the heroes of the dialogue and they make it human. They live their lives, there are parts of history and beyond them, they are indifferent although they feel how much politics affects them. They take part there meanwhile it‘s as if they wanted stay out of time. The Austrians.
Whores' Glory
Whores’ Glory Glory is a cinematic triptych on prostitution: three locations, three languages, three religions. Paradise, the world and the hereafter merge in prostitution to create an image of the relationship between men and women. In Thailand, women wait for men behind glass panes, staring at reflections of themselves. In Bangladesh men go to a ghetto of love to satisfy their unfulfilled desires on trapped girls. And in Mexico, women pray to a female death so as not to see and feel their own reality. Where the most intimate becomes a commodity, the product is expensive and fiercely contested. Making the reality all the more unexpected: Beauty lives amidst cruelty and violence, the mind becomes a personal jail, and love happens where you least expect it.
Megacities
Bombay, Mexico City, Moscow, New York: seductive yet repellent monsters. The contradiction insinuates itself into the daily lives of those who populate theses megacities. In 12 chapters the film tells the stories of Shankar the bioscope man, Modesto the chicken feet seller, Babu Khan the colour sifter, Nestor the rubbish collector, of the street kids Oleg, Borja, Kolya and Misha, Cassandra the actress, Larissa the crane driver and Tony the hustler. Day in, day out they all set about their struggle for survival with ingenuity, intelligence and dignity. And they all share a single fantasy: the dream of a better life.
France, Here We Come!
Analysis of the Austrian soccer craze at the time of the world championships in France.
In the working class dying out? Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible? Where can we still find it in the 21st century? Workingman`s Death follows the trail of the HEROES in illegal mines in the Ukraine, sniffs out GHOSTS among the sulfur workers in Indonesia, finds itself face to face with LIONS at a slaughterhause in Nigeria, mingles with BROTHERS as they cut a huge oil tanker into pieces in Pakistan, and joins Chinese steel workers in hoping for a glorious FUTURE.
State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters
It wasn‘t the goal to make just a report on Austria but to contribute to a discussion. Turn the spectator into another debater. The moving picture of the group of four directors tries to render the social situation, economic factors and the ideology mixtures that naturally outline the present life without significant concessions. The document is not a critic analysis of Austrian political crises, which could be a symptom of western-european standards. It is rather its statement, which is more less a consequence of sociological reckoned on practical life of presentation of representative types. Barbara Albert portraitured working women, single mothers. A cashier in a supermarket, a worker at an endless band in a factory, a convinced elector for the Freedom a woman of Turkish nationality and an unemployed artist of action. The director catches them in brief moments of everyday life however even from there we can read what the political conviction grows from. Michael Glawogger set off by himself. During three weeks he crossed Austria hitchhiking. With a small camera he was getting in to random drivers. The journey mainly followed the state border. The most often picture there is a driver with the countryside running away behind the window. The sentence fragments are glued together as a mosaic of views and opinions on the government, opposition, the monarch and the European Union, on immigrants. Ulrich Seidl. The most ordinary Austrians as well, fascinate the director of controversial movie Psí dny (Dog days) presented in Czech cinemas, the intimacy of their stereotype lives. He chose one of the monotonous motives for his part of the collective document. - A notorious complainer, who spends his life writing letters to authorities and an elderly couple, who view themselves surrounded with a bunch of foreigners, as the country and tradition savers. Michael Strumminger followed a prominent telecast and peaked into two different living rooms. He found there children and their grandparents - two groups not interested in politics. Not yet and not any more. However, there is a shadow on them as well. The bipolarity tension between politics and non-politics follows the whole film, which only summaries, points and in places condensed way popularize the endless discussion about the state of public affairs. The bearers of different ideas are the heroes of the dialogue and they make it human. They live their lives, there are parts of history and beyond them, they are indifferent although they feel how much politics affects them. They take part there meanwhile it‘s as if they wanted stay out of time. The Austrians.
Whores' Glory
Whores’ Glory Glory is a cinematic triptych on prostitution: three locations, three languages, three religions. Paradise, the world and the hereafter merge in prostitution to create an image of the relationship between men and women. In Thailand, women wait for men behind glass panes, staring at reflections of themselves. In Bangladesh men go to a ghetto of love to satisfy their unfulfilled desires on trapped girls. And in Mexico, women pray to a female death so as not to see and feel their own reality. Where the most intimate becomes a commodity, the product is expensive and fiercely contested. Making the reality all the more unexpected: Beauty lives amidst cruelty and violence, the mind becomes a personal jail, and love happens where you least expect it.
Megacities
Bombay, Mexico City, Moscow, New York: seductive yet repellent monsters. The contradiction insinuates itself into the daily lives of those who populate theses megacities. In 12 chapters the film tells the stories of Shankar the bioscope man, Modesto the chicken feet seller, Babu Khan the colour sifter, Nestor the rubbish collector, of the street kids Oleg, Borja, Kolya and Misha, Cassandra the actress, Larissa the crane driver and Tony the hustler. Day in, day out they all set about their struggle for survival with ingenuity, intelligence and dignity. And they all share a single fantasy: the dream of a better life.
France, Here We Come!
Analysis of the Austrian soccer craze at the time of the world championships in France.
Born in Graz, Austria, in 1959, Michael Glawogger is a traveling filmmaker. Not only does he literally journey around the world for his documentaries, he also moves back and forth between forms and genres, between photography and writing, between gentler and more forceful tones. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and the Vienna Film Academy and has since worked as a director, writer, and cinematographer in Vienna, Bangkok, and Znojmo. He plans to shoot in Poland and Bangladesh in the near future.