– Austrian director Katharina Rabl’s feature debut deals with heritage and family patterns that entire generations of women are stuck in
Julia Windischbauer and Lukas Walcher in Memories of a Forest
When we return home after a long absence in the pursuit of our goals and find that our memories no longer tally with what we used to take for granted, a tension is created between a sense of duty and the wish to escape transgenerational patterns. This especially holds for women in traditional, rural communities such as the Waldviertel region in Lower Austria, where Linz-born director Katharina Rabl grew up, and where she set and filmed her graduation film from Munich’s HFF, Memories of a Forest. The picture has just had its world premiere in the Munich International Film Festival‘s New German Cinema section.
Frieda (Julia Windischbauer) is writing her doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna and gets a job offer there as soon as she completes it. But when her grandmother Elisabeth dies and she comes back to her hometown of Rickwitz for what she believes will only be two days, she discovers that she has inherited a spruce forest. As her parents, Johanna (Johanna Orsini) and Alexander (Dominik Warta), are in a dire financial situation – Mum was taking care of Grandma full-time and Dad has had back surgery – her first instinct is to sell it. But Johanna won’t hear of it, as her mother bequeathed it to the granddaughter. So, in order to at least pay for the funeral, Frieda joins forces with neighbour and childhood friend Friedrich (Lukas Walcher), who has been managing it, in order to fell some trees and sell them. But it turns out they are infested with bark beetle, meaning they are worth half the normal price – and soon, the local sawmill stops buying them altogether.
Apparently just as driven as she has been up to now about her academic career, which is suffering owing to her preoccupation with her family, Frieda immerses herself in figuring out what to do with the forest, which represents both immaterial and material heritage. The former is reflected in old secrets that reveal unexpected similarities between Frieda and Grandma, with Johanna coming across as the most tragic and guilt-ridden figure in the family line – and Orsini’s performance is indeed a standout among the generally solid cast.
DoP Jacob Kohl films traditionally in natural light on digital, but with washed-out colours and a slightly grainy texture that stands out in the forest scenes as the sawdust dances in the rays of light that break through the tall spruce branches and that reflect off the drops of sweat on Frieda’s face as she works with the chainsaw and forklift truck. Images of heavy machinery highlight the mechanical, monetary role of the wood and the material element of the heritage, elegantly supplemented by the score by Peter Kutin, which occasionally employs industrial-tinged rhythms over the roughly textured drones that often play in loops – just like the family patterns that Frieda and her female predecessors have been stuck in for generations.
Memories of a Forest is a co-production between Germany’s Leykauf Film and Austria’s Mischief.
