Wolfgang Fisher – Styx #FestFilmLRSY

PODCAST| Bénédicte Prot interviews Wolfgang Fisher, director of the film Styx.

A lovely and captivating talk with the author of one of the most important and significant films of the year, despite its minimalistic apparatus. Wolfgang Fisher explains that the core idea of the project, nine years ago, was always to reflect upon how we Europeans would respond to an environment so archaic and hostile, doubled with a situation so overwhelming as the one his main character is faced with, a character whose thoughts and dilemmas the viewer is forced to stay with throughout the whole film. He underlines that in order to deal with that theme, it was important to actually confront the ocean and fake nothing, despite the challenge that was a 42-day shoot on a 11-meter boat out a sea, and points out what the role of Rike entailed in this nearly dialogue-less, yet so incredibly telling feature. The Austrian director also says that as his film is about how help functions in Europe and as, contrary Rike who is completely alone, we have ways of standing together, he really values the opportunity offered by the LUX Prize to show his film at the European Parliament, where decisions are made, and thus be able to trigger dialogue not by presenting data, but through the powerful emotions fiction is able to convey. The interview ends on his telling us more about the incredibly graceful opening scene, so dreamy yet completely true to facts.

Styx: As Rike (Susanne Wolff), a German first-aid doctor, sails away to the paradisiac, tropical destinations she has been dreaming about, out in the shimmering blue, her path crosses that of a boat of migrants in distress on that majestic inferno that is the ocean, but her compulsion to rescue is met with striking reluctance on the part of the responder speaking on the other side of her radio, placing her, while human beings are dying before her very eyes, in a situation of disarray and helplessness with unbearable moral implications which reflects the apotheosis of inhumanity that is the utter indifference of our world towards the tragedies of the other half.