Views of a Retired Night Porter

Colour, DIGIBETA
Austria, 2006, 30 min
Section: Documentary Films in Competition

Synopsis

In his documentary film Night Porter’s Point of View (1977), Krzysztof Kieslowski introduced audiences to the “watchdog” of the Communist regime, whose guiding life principle was to subject factory employees to thorough scrutiny. Almost thirty years later, the Austrian filmmaker Andreas Horvath profiles this man once again, whose views, despite the different political situation, haven’t changed. Horvath’s film is a bitterly poetic swan song of the somewhat unsettling old days, and of one of the period’s devoted adherents.

About the director

Andreas Horvath (b. 1968, Salzburg, Austria) is a photographer, film director and author of a book of photographs on the American Midwest (1993) and the Siberian city of Yakutsk (2003). Select filmography: Clearance (1989), Poroerotus (1999), The Silence of Green (2002). For the film This Ain’t No Heartland (2004) he won several awards, including the Main Prize at the 2nd International Documentary Film Festival in Chicago.