DECAMERON, 1348 AND TODAY

HEINRICH LEDEBUR

Always wanted to "become a farmer." Agricultural entrepreneur and business coach who focuses on the differentiated translation of ecological "laws of nature" to the economic system.

TOSH KARTH

Together with his wife Mabel, the native South African produces organic vegetables according to the old tradition of "market gardening" in Pulkau, where their three children can grow up happily and without worries alongside the vegetables.

JOHANNES LEDEBUR

He turned 30 and became a teacher during the Corona pandemic, and is an incorrigibly optimistic nihilist in constant search of change.

MARIA LEDEBUR

She loves her family and lives her friends, passionately grows vegetables and practices shiatsu therapy, loves to travel - and is at home everywhere.

REINHARD LEHNINGER

A country doctor who is always hungry for all facets of live, has a golden baritone voice and a clinical-romantic eye for earthly and heavenly beauties.

WOLFGANG LORENZ

Former director of Austrian television, country mouse and town rat, repressive democrat without affiliation. Art freak, painter as well as collector of rare people.

ELISABETH MELICHAR

Married to her husband Ferdinand for 38 years, mother of three grown-up children. She has been a gallery owner since 2013, he a painter since 1985. They live in Vienna and Niederfladnitz / Lower Austria.

DOROTHEA MAY

Coach, self-help, new homeopathy, systemic structure constellations, trance work, lives and works in the Weinviertel since 2007.

FERDINAND MELICHAR

Married to his wife Elisabeth for 38 years, father of three grown-up children. He has been a painter since 1985, she is a gallery owner since 2013. They live in Vienna and Niederfladnitz / Lower Austria.

ALOIS MOSBACHER

Visual artist who works between figurative and abstract painting to installations, he is one of the essential representatives of "Austrian New Art" in the 1980s.

SANDRA NALEPKA

After graduating in psychology and working in the cultural sector for many years, the half-Swedish and part-time wine-quarterly now trades full-time in Scandinavian design.

FULVIO ORTU

Born in Trieste, he studied and graduated in the U.S., he is a professor of finance at Bocconi University in Milan and an internationally experienced economist.

AUN RAZA

French-Pakistani photographer who combines portraits of strong souls with street scenes and melancholy landscapes to create long, dense and often humorous works.

FRENZI RIGLING

Swiss artist in the Weinviertel, whose art is in the tension field between harmlessness and neurosis and, in all its loud materiality, has something slightly oblique and deviant about it.

ELISABETH SAMSONOW

German-Austrian artist and philosopher, lives in Vienna and Hadres / Lower Austria, where she founded the "Land of the Goddesses" on four hectares of land.

GABRIELE SCHÖNE

Born in Mistelbach/Zaya, artist of figurative and abstract paintings, installations and video works; after 38 years in Vienna and elsewhere, she has turned back to her roots and lives in Pillersdorf near Retz since 2018.

MARYLISE VIGNEAU

A literary-trained photographer who favors allusion over description, the ontological over the ethnological, and explores the impact of the physical-mental tightrope walk on our freedom.

JOHANNES HEUER

Born 1962 in Vienna, married and father of three sons. Since 2005 at Retz mutated from Weinviertler Wiener to Wiener Weinviertler. Tamer of material.

DEVORAH GAUTSCHI

Holistic feminist, antinatalist, political activist with a mission to limit harm.

MABEL KARTH

Together with her husband Torsten "Tosh" Karth she produces organic vegetables according to the old tradition of the "Market Garden" in Pulkau, where her three children can grow up happily and without worries next to the vegetables.

SANDRA BÄR HEUER

Art historian, garden architect, mother, psychotherapist in training, grew up near Zurich in a cosmopolitan environment, married and mother of three sons, living in Vienna since 1993 and in Retz since 2005.

BRIGITTE CORELL

Artist, materiasoph and pioneer, who understands what has become obsolete and unusable as compost for the imagination against the material battle of abundance.

JAKOB GASTEIGER

Painter and sculpturer, born 1953 in Salzburg,

lives in Vienna and the Weinviertel.

In our film, they narrate their personal experience of the "first wave" of the coronavirus between spring and early summer 2020. Some of them were born in the Austrian "Wine Quarter" region, others have come from far and even farther lands. But for all of them, the landscape and the people of this reagion were important to overcome what will probably remain one of the strangest and most challenging moment of their lives.

The dramaturgical linking of these conversations with Boccaccio's Decameron creates, on the one hand, a snapshot of the pandemics first and strangest moment. On the other hand, the personal experience of a "state of emergency" without a forseeable end, made many people rethink their lives.

Hence, our filmed conversations touch on sense and nonsense, life and death, and the elementary questions of human existence that move us most today, as they did then.

Music is the third dramaturgical element of this film: it creates an emotional connection between the conversations and the stunning landscapes of Lower Austria. We were lucky to work with Austrian composer Johanna Doderer for this film. Our collaboration began as a challenge and has evolved into a close dialogue.

Johanna's musical bridges connect narrative strings in a timeless way. They counterpoint the images and the words, and they allow yet another narrative level to emerge. Music reveals the emotional backbone of this film.

The plague of 1348 and our present time, which continues to be poisoned by the Covid-19 virus, are historical caesuras that divide our history into two eras: the time before the pandemic and the time after. This film looks at the moment that lies in between.

Dirk van den Berg - Director

PROTAGONISTS

"Feeling compassion for the troubled is the duty of all men, but it is especially expected of those who themselves once needed consolation and found it with others. I, too, am one of these..."

These words are the opening of Giovanni Boccaccio's DECAMERON - more precisely, the framing-story, which is unknown for most of us. In fact, the "Decameron" is not only a collection of more or less immoral stories, but a gripping narration of the world's first pandemic: the Black Plague of 1348.

In the framing story of the "Decameron", Boccaccio recounts his personal experience with the Black Plague in his hometown of Florence, Italy. He describes the pandemic's devastating effects on the economy, political and social stability, and the rule of law. To this day, the dozen pages are arguably the most terrifying account of a pandemic ever written.

Seven hundred years after the Black Plague raged and brought death to nearly half of Europe's population, suddenly the world finds itself in a new pandemic. In early 2020, Covid-19 brought humanity to a standstill and literally suspended our lives. All of us were thrown into an unprecedented state of seemingly worldwide immobility by the simultaneously global and local "forced pause".

But life didn't stand still. Our thoughts did not stop in their tracks. On the contrary, they somersaulted. Many of us tried to find a purpose in this strange moment - with a pinch of utopia and presumption, perhaps even with the hope to find a meaning in all this.

Hence, during the first "lockdown" in early 2020, we had the idea of making a film about this strange state.We wanted to somehow document the "outer constraints" and "inner necessities" of this ambivalent and unique moment. And we turned to the people around us - which was also the only viable way to do this during a curfew and "lockdown" situation.

Between March and May 2020, we filmed more than two dozen conversations with friends and acquaintances. They became the miniature portraits of a very heterogeneous group, not unlike Boccaccio's "Allegra Brigata" seven hundred years earlier.

CONTACTS

CREATIVE TEAM

> Johanna Doderer's website

>Olivia Furtwängler's website

> Dirk van den Berg's website