Crash Test Dummies

Colour, 35 mm
Austria, 2005, 93 min
Section: Another View
Oficiální stránky: www.crashtestdummies.at

Synopsis

Ana and Nicolae travel from Bucharest to Vienna by coach. They have to pick up a stolen car and take it back to Romania. Things don’t go exactly according to plan and they have to wait a few days. They have no money and their original optimism is beginning to wane. And their relationship is cracking under the strain. Nicolae makes the acquaintance of the highly obliging Dana, and Ana crosses paths several times with a shy but good-natured store detective called Jan. He has a flatmate, Martha, who suffers from depression. The somnambulant girl earns money as a human dummy during car crash tests. Like her, the other protagonists also experience their life “collisions”, sometimes with tragic, at other times comic touches. Debuting Austrian director Jörg Kalt uses a traditional mosaic structure of narration, in which the stories of several people gradually intertwine, people who are united in their existence as strange outsiders. The individual episodes develop like spokes from the hub of Vienna’s Central Station.     

About the director

Jörg Kalt (b. 1967, Suresnes near Paris) grew up in Zurich and Munich. In the years 1987-1990 he studied English language and literature and law at Zurich University, and worked as a journalist. He attended Prague’s FAMU (1991-92) and studied directing under Peter Patzak at the Vienna Film Academy (1994-2001). Apart from his feature debut Crash Test Dummies (2005), screened this year at the Berlin IFF, he has made several short and medium-length films, e.g. Eternity Starts Here (1992-93), Meine Mutter war ein Metzger (1997), Lesen macht tot (2000) and Richtung Zukunft durch die Nacht (2002).