Gernot Wieland’s films keep dissecting his upbringing in postwar Austria, an environment of repression where fear passed as common sense, cruelty came with permission, and a child’s imagination learned early on how to fall in line with power. In Thievery and Songs, this material opens into a strikingly beautiful tragicomic work that unearths something utterly sad as it traces the obscene and absurd textures of the Austrian condition, where trauma, guilt, repression, and social hierarchy keep shaping the present. Haunted by recurring dreams of landscapes, the narrator enters therapy, where animals, fairy tales, and Freud drift into the conversation. In the end, the landscapes dissolve into fog and silence as he concludes: “Now I know why I dream of these landscapes. They are the opposite of fear, and I do not exist in them.”
