Western

Valeska Grisebach
,
AT, DE
,
2017
,
DCP
,
colour
,
121'

Custody of a white horse is one of several bones of contention between Bulgarian locals and German laborers in WESTERN, a dispute with a classic symbolic dimension: Does he who rides the white horse also get to be the good guy? That’s one of several oblique ways in which the eponymous genre bleeds into this quietly involving culture-clash drama, down to its lone-wolf protagonist: a mostly silent stranger whose incursions into the Bulgarian community set masculine tensions flaring on both sides. Meinhard is the newest member in a team of construction men, sent to a remote green patch of rural Bulgaria to build a water power plant. He’s an able, aloof worker less fazed than his colleagues about resistance from the local villagers. But cultural battles could easily erupt in this particular east-meets-west showdown. (Guy Lodge)

“Several different paths led to this film that, increasingly and by association, joined together to form a story. One was the Western genre. I grew up with it during the 1970s, sitting in front of a TV set in West Berlin. It never ceased to captivate me in a strange, cozy way, and eventually triggered my desire to return to it – as if to a place I’d been before. As a girl, I identified with the male heroes of Western films and at the same time had crushes on them, so I was always excluded from the start. Perhaps this conflict also contributed to my wish to explore this per se “male” genre. I wanted to get closer to the solitary, inflated, often melancholic male characters of the Western.” (Valeska Grisebach)

FOLLOWED BY A CONVERSATION WITH VALESKA GRISEBACH