Austrian filmmaker Manuel Wetscher made a name for himself with such fiction shorts as 2018’s Four Seasons, 2021’s At Night When Mice Scream and 2022’s Magma. Then came the 2024 experimental short doc Richard, a particularly personal film. “I only learnt the real reason for my father’s death 10 years after he died,” reads a synopsis for the film. “At first, I was told that he had died of pneumonia, then later of lung cancer. The truth finally came out from a drunken relative at a birthday party when I was 17 years old. Since then, I have known that my father died of AIDS in 1993 at the age of 40.”Wetscher’s feature film debut Eklipse, which world premieres in the Horizons section of the 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 5, is inspired by his experience of being kept in the dark on the details of his father’s situation by his family. And as the title, which means “eclipse,” suggests, the sun plays a role in the movie, just as it did in Magma. And yes, the title Eklipse is spelled with a “k” in both its German and English versions.
Eklipse, starring Moritz Hohlrieder as Tomy and Finley Brown as his best friend Chris, is set in the 1990s at an alpine dairy farm in Austria. The two teenagers spend a summer helping Tomy’s uncle, portrayed by Hannes Perkmann, with milking and other duties, as well as exploring the outdoors.
