Two strangers cross paths on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa: a former refugee from Africa and a woman who escaped to the island to cope with a personal crisis. Memories, dreams and the present intersect and blend in this contemplative and visually arresting masterpiece by Austrian Peter Schreiner.

Lampedusa

It seems to be an intermediate world of peace and quiet, the garden and country house where four people look back on testing lives. And forward, to the time they have left. On the one hand, there is regret – on the other, satisfaction. In a way, they are looking forward to the future – but at the same time, a longing for death regularly arises. And who is actually behind the camera? Are we watching actors or real people? Is there really any difference? Garten is full of contradictions – it is not until the credits roll that we realise who these people from very different backgrounds are.

Garden

Tage is not a memoir of Schreiner's battle with his illness – this is merely hinted at, almost obliquely. Schreiner considered his ailing body above all an artistic challenge: What is possible, what can be developed from the set of options and perspectives such a state of being offers? Curiously enough, Tage turned into a variation of his last finished film, Garten (2019): a chamber piece shot almost exclusively in his house, featuring himself and his beloved wife Maria as well as some friends. It is also a return to a cinema of intimacy that he'd last essayed with Kinderfilm (1985). With all of that, Schreiner strove for and reached yet another level of artistic freedom with Tage, for none of his works to date are as light-footed in their movement: pure stream-of-conscious in a diaristic framework – a film as open as Schreiner's restlessly searching soul and endlessly curious heart.