Home, Patric Chiha, Austria-France, 2006, 50' OV FR Sub. ES
The two French businessmen look especially out of place in the lush green of the Styrian forest. But that is simply consistent, as Patric Chiha´s short fiction film Home tells of what it is like to be in the wrong place, in more ways than one. On the one hand, Fouad and his younger colleague have simply gotten lost on their way to the firm "Lodenwalker". The streets they take, and the forest paths they embark upon seem to take them one step further from where they want to go.
Yet beyond that, Home devises a second, more dissipated story that leads into the reels of memory. For Fouad, the business trip also becomes a return to the country of his childhood. The pictures of the surroundings evoke memories. In a monologue, he addresses them to an imaginary listener, or perhaps simply to himself. We learn about his mother who left Austria at the end of World War II and searched for happiness as a dancer in Beirut - and already, the movements of the waitress in the pub also seem to follow a certain choreography. Yet the mother´s comparatively glamorous story, shown in Super-8 clips that shift into the picture, corresponds in only a negative way with the natural setting. Through Fouad´s stories, the rustic idyll appears as a place that has resisted all forms of change. A place where time stands still, where the horrors of the past have accumulated and are even reflected in recent acts. "Nothing has changed," says Fouad, "but I don´t recognize anything." In this sense, Home describes an impossible return home - and arouses the uncanniness of an area that remains too similar to itself.
The two French businessmen look especially out of place in the lush green of the Styrian forest.