Children of Vienna
If the Austrian capital is known for its national opera, its imperial palace of the Hofburg or for its Schönbrunn castle, it also acquires a certain notoriety in the hearts of film lovers thanks to the artists it sees born. Fritz Lang, the great master of Austrian cinema, director of Metropolis (1927) and M, le maudit (1931) among others; Peter Kubelka, director and co-founder of the Österreichisches Filmmuseum; Wilti Forst, who made Bel Ami (1939); actors Erich Von Stroheim and Fritz Korner and director Josef Von Sternberg all had one thing in common, apart from their immense talent, and that was that they were all born in beautiful Vienna. In the 1950s, another child of Vienna, Romy Schneider, played the famous Empress Sissi in the eponymous film series (1955) by Ernst Marischka. This series is part of the Heimatfilm genre (German country films, in French, mostly shot in Germany, Switzerland and Austria) always characterized by a staging around a picturesque countryside and its singular inhabitants. Since the end of the 1980s, we obviously notice Michael Haneke, director of the famous Benny's Video (1992), Funny Games (1997), The Pianist (2000) or recently Happy End (2017). Austrian favorite of the biggest festivals in the world such as the Cannes Film Festival, he won many awards during his career as in 2009 with The White Ribbon and in 2012 with his work Amour, which both won the Palme d'Or. Haneke also launched a line of Austrian directors such as Ulrich Seidl, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Stephan Ruzowitzky, Florian Flickere, expressing themselves in both documentary and black fiction. Most of the members of this new generation of filmmakers trained at the Wiener Filmakademie, the film school in Vienna, renowned for its avant-garde approach.
