Debt of Love

Renate is finishing her trainee year as a social service worker when she is assigned her first patient: The young Alfred Hauser, who was submitted to the psychiatric ward four years ago because of a psychosis. Alfred's anxiety condition is worsening while the hospital staff is lying to him about the possibility of an early discharge. Renate is commited to help him.

Another one of those stories we hear almost every day: refugees are picked up on Austria's border after a dramatic chase. And then nothing more is heard of them. The problem is apparently resolved in the usual way, through incarceration and deportation. But it's different this time: the story continues in Ghana, where everything is suddenly turned upside down.

Based on the testimonies of 4 survivors, a powerful documentary on the treatment inflicted on Soviet war prisoners, suspected of betrayal by the Stalinist regime. An exceptional word that pays homage to hundred of thousands of forgotten victims.

When the busses left, the nurse said to the children, 'Today you have to pray a lot, because today you go up the chimney and meet the good Lord.' The children of the area knew these vehicles and said, 'Look, there is another one of these killer busses.' And they said to one another, ' You are not very clever, you, too, are going to end up in the oven in Hartheim, you, too, will be hung up in the chimney.' Hartheim Castle near Linz was one of several places of destruction of 'unworthy life' within the framework of the euthanasia program of National Socialism. Over 30,000 mentally or physically handicapped, psychiatric patients and inmates of concentration camps were gassed in Hartheim between 1940 and 1945. Today Hartheim Castle is rented and inhabited. In a place where 40 years ago thousands if lives were destroyed by industrial methods, today life asserts itself in the trite daily function of living. The documentation is about Hartheim Castle, in the past and in the present.

This film is based on the actual events referred to as the "Mühlviertler Hasenjagd" (Hare-hunt in the Mühlviertel) which occurred in February 1945 around the Mauthausen concentration camp. 500 Soviet officers form death block 20 attempt to escape, but only 150 of them actually succeed. Following the tally-ho of the SS, a barbaric manhunt begins. Only very few fugitives survive. With a lot of good luck, the two young officers Michail and Nikolai reach the Karner family's farm. Frau Karner persuades her husband to hide the two escapees.

When Johanna's blind grandmother Ruth tells her the secret about their Jewish past, the “sleeping dogs” of the family history awake.

Warm summer afternoons, concentrated on a group of young women and men on a weekend in the small town of Wels, form the setting for Andreas Gruber's diploma film, which was shot at the Vienna Film Academy and exclusively with amateur actors. The film primarily tells stories of adolescence, the basic tenor of which is already revealed in the film's title, through poses staged with attention to detail. The soundtrack provides the driving narrative force, not only expressing feelings and hopes, but also elegantly capturing a mood defined by waiting, while simultaneously archiving it.