Solvent
A team of international experts turns a derelict farmhouse upside-down in their search for suspected hidden Nazi documents. But what sprouts in the farmhouse’s rotten walls is not just black mold; what has also survived in the cracks and corners is the past’s toxic way of thinking. Johannes Grenzfurthner’s reliably radical(ly humorous) fathoming of the Austrian psyche in stream-of-consciousness style is a witty and sometimes hilariously low-brow POV-horror grotesque. The director leads the viewer down to dank, damp cellars where yesteryear’s gunk seeps unhindered into the present. And the result is a film as visionary as it is insane. (mk)
In attendance of Johannes Grenzfurthner (director), Jon Gries (actor), Pieter de Graaf (composer) and Tom Gorai (executive producer)
is the founder and artistic director of the well-known art and theory group monochrom. His many activities span a wide range of fields that include contemporary art, activism, postmodernism, media theory, subversion, and debates about copyright and intellectual property. He is also the head of Arse Elektronika, a sex and technology festival founded in San Francisco, and of Roboexotica, the festival for “cocktail robotics” in Vienna. In his own idiosyncratic fashion, he has created a considerable number of films, such as the agitprop grotesque satire Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl (SLASH 2014), Masking Threshold, the documentary Hacking at Leaves (2024) and, most recently, the horror mystery Solvent.
