“The end of a love affair”.
He is as much a part of Vienna as Lipizzaner stallions, Sachertorte and Hans Moser. But now André Heller intends to leave the city of his forefathers. At the age of 42 he plans a decisive break with his past life.
We wanted to create an account of André Heller at this planned (or staged?) turning point in his life. From the perspective of a man about to say farewell he recounts and evaluates once more his life in Vienna (his parents, his Jewish father, his path to art as a means of rescuing himself, the search for his own way of life between kitsch, art and consumer society, and the effort required to be - to become - André Heller). We wanted to hear from his own lips which stages Heller has been through in his personal confrontation with his home in Vienna (like the bogeyman of the middle classes from the coffee-houses, always standing in the shadows, offended by the “whore Vienna”), and how this separation has come about.
This film represents an attempt to take stock of Heller’s life, at a central point in the artist’s existence; not depicting a complete chronology but rather fragments of “a small confession”. The selection and emphasis is determined by a farewell stroll around Vienna. Together with Heller we shall wander through locations which have stories to tell, stories which are told by him (a cemetery, a park, his house).
In Gardone Riviera we shall talk with Heller about what is to come, imaginative musings about which parts of his own stories will be enacted in this new open space. How will he fill the empty house? What are his thoughts about growing old? Which chances does he hope for in the years to come?