Hans(2017)

In July of this year, Hans Hurch travelled to Rome to meet Abel Ferrara and discuss the terms and content for a potential Viennale trailer with him. Following Hurch's unexpected death, Ferrara conceived the trailer as an obituary: We see a landscape at dusk and hear music and children crying in the distance. The face of the late Viennale director is superimposed, his first name pronounced by an electronically distorted voice that can hardly be understood. Captured in an extremely aesthetic manner, a photo of Bob Dylan in his youth and an emblematic image of John Ford with a black patch over his eye are rolling past. Abel Ferrara's trailer is a phantasmagoria, a visual game of deception, combining some of the things that were important to Hans Hurch with dream-like sequences and celebrating a moment of utmost existential compression. In his accompanying note, Ferrara wrote: "A small thank you to someone who constantly and consistently maintained the dream of the eternal cinema."