Producers Statement

A talent waiting for its chance

In my view Adrian Goiginger is one of the greatest talents in this country — Brigitte Dithard of SWR calls him the greatest talent currently studying in Ludwigsburg. His screenplays and ideas are compelling, they leave nobody cold, and they polarise the selection committees and juries of festivals and international awards. He gets noticed in any case: the mere mention of his name makes curators sit up and ask questions, in the expectation that something remarkable will have to come of it.

With his short film “Aitch”, made before he had even turned twenty, he won the audience award at the now defunct television channel “Austria 9”. The polarising story, in which a drug-addicted father guilty of his daughter’s death is interrogated by his own conscience, unsettled the jury so thoroughly that they could make nothing of it and preferred to leave Adrian’s film aside. The audience, however, was visibly enthusiastic, and with gritted teeth the dramaturges and experts had to hand the audience award to the young newcomer from Salzburg.

The subject of “The Best of All Worlds” is a mother’s love for her child. A love that endures everything and overcomes everything. The addiction, the circumstances, the environment — the mother’s love makes the seemingly impossible possible: that Adrian has a happy childhood in which, from his own point of view, he lacks nothing. That Helga had a child as a teenager whose father died of an overdose shortly afterwards, that it took her a long time to get out of the drug milieu, that not even Helga’s father or the neighbours in the municipal housing block claim to have noticed any of it — none of this is fiction, it was reality. A reality that exists many times over today, in our midst. But the film is also a declaration of love: Adrian Goiginger’s to his late mother.

We have worked with Adrian Goiginger since his short film “Aitch”. We accompanied a feature film project whose financing ultimately fell through — today it is clear to us that the screenplay simply was not good enough at the time. With the test shoot and the screenplay for that project, however, Goiginger gained admission to the renowned Baden-Württemberg Film Academy in Ludwigsburg. With the same application material he would also have been accepted at the “Konrad Wolf” film school in Berlin, but he decided on Ludwigsburg, where he studies; there too we supported and advised Adrian as best we could.

As producer, but also as script doctor and dramaturge, I looked after “The Best of All Worlds” over three years and played a substantial part in its development. The Austrian Film Institute supported the project from the very beginning; financing the production, however, turned out to be a hard nut to crack. In January 2015 we then shot a teaser in Salzburg, already with Verena Altenberger as Helga, which is said to have helped considerably with the financing.

A remark on the authenticity of the film: we tried to walk that narrow line — to tell the events as they really happened (the newspaper article about the apartment fire underlines that a true story is being told here) and still meet the requirements of a cinematic adaptation.

My personal thanks go first of all to the Austrian Film Institute: to its director Roland Teichmann, to the selection committee that laid the foundation of the financing, and to Alessandro Chia, who accompanied the project on behalf of the institute. Our second thanks go to Brigitte Dithard, commissioning editor at SWR, who was likewise on board from the start. The screenplay had been passed to her, and having read it she said: yes, we’ll do this — even though the connection to the state of Baden-Württemberg lies solely in the fact that the director studies there. With the kind support of ORF through the film and television agreement, the media authority of Baden-Württemberg, the M.F.G., and the city and province of Salzburg, it became possible to finance the film.

Last but not least, warm thanks are due here to our co-producer Nils Dünker and his Lailaps Pictures in Munich for the collaboration. Nils was and is just as enthusiastic about Adrian’s talent and his film as all of us, and contributed substantially to its success.

Wolfgang Ritzberger
RitzlFilm

Post scriptum: the question of why the subject of drug addiction seems to be blanked out of public reporting and public debate would be worth pursuing. The number of drug addicts in our midst has not fallen; on the contrary, it has risen. Our society, though, has no use for “losers”, and seems unwilling to concern itself with those who are not “beautiful”, who cannot withstand the pressure, who do not fit the system. Nobody takes drugs because they enjoy the taste — but the problems that lead to addiction are no longer negotiated in public. Taking that up seemed to us worth a documentary alongside the film. The making of shows precisely this subject and follows the writer and director Adrian Goiginger on the trail of his own childhood — during his research for the film, for instance while studying his file at the Salzburg youth welfare office, and later during the shoot on location. His stepfather has been clean for more than ten years and today works with drug addicts who are willing to undergo therapy.

And there are others we should certainly thank:

First a young lady whose films had already drawn attention at the Diagonale and whom Adrian engaged as assistant director from the directing class in Ludwigsburg. She actually comes from Styria and was a pillar of support and an indispensable help to the director: Sandra Wollner, whom I would like to thank most warmly here for her commitment and her loyalty.

Then two pillars of wellbeing: Andi Zopf and Rosi Fuchs, who ran the catering. Andi, a professional of the Salzburg scene with his “flying cooks”, was responsible for the wonderful lunch buffets, and Rosi spoiled the team with a craft service we soon could not do without. A heartfelt thank you to both, it was wonderful.

A big, fat, threefold hurrah as well to the production team around the two production managers Viktor Perdula and Mathias Hammer, who together with Tanja Wolf and the two unit managers Serena and Peter Sommer and their assistants formed an outstanding team.