Manfred Kaufmann

Caught Feelings is the succinct title of a film which deals with emancipation trends from the viewpoint of young Austrians. Manfred Kaufmann's first film reports on tensions which may arise from the contradictions between collective and individual feelings. He works with subtle and psychologically perfected indications which explain the symptoms and illustrate the reactions. But this film is also a vehement attack on bourgeois feelings and the resulting behaviours. He shows character traits which use masks to simulate emotion as well as those which are ready to remove their masks in order to let feelings take effect. (Herbert Holba)

Katharina and Sonja meet by chance on a train journey to Klagenfurt. Sonja, who wants to prepare for an exam, invites Katharina to live with her. The two different girls get to know the equally opposing men Thomas and Peter. Beyond the little holiday flirtations, Sonja and Katharina discover that they fell in love with the same man in Vienna...

19 months after the fall of the dictator Somoza, the Austrian film team travels across Nicaragua for seven weeks (from August 4th to September 20th, 1980) and gathers information, mostly from farmers, workers, market women and soldiers. We are shown life in the Fincas, the agricultural co-operatives, in a banana plantation of Standard Fruit, a private corporation, in the "Carlos Roberto Huembes Hospital" in La Esperanza which is run by Austrians. A report on Nicaragua of 1980 which discusses the dream of the murdered freedom fighter of Nicaragua, General C.A. Sandino and whether it has been realized and answers this question affirmativeley. In spite of the present and threatening difficulties, the film is optimistic.

Fragmented stories about the big city, loneliness and the need to communicate.