Loss Is to Be Expected

Seidl sets his camera down on the Austrian and Czech border. Two villages look at each other across it. The curtain between them came down two years earlier. On the Austrian side lives a widower past sixty. The meals his late wife packed into the freezer are running out. He starts looking for a new wife. He turns his binoculars toward the other side of the border. There he sees a widow living by herself. She is one of the Germans allowed to stay in Bohemia after the war. The two of them try to move toward each other. The camera moves through both villages in the depth of winter. The border has been erased from the map but not from their heads. Seidl wrote the script together with Michael Glawogger. The film sets old age on the two sides of the border beside each other. Loneliness here looks like a condition the two countries hold in common. Ulrich Seidl directed the one hundred eighteen minute documentary. It is an Austrian production finished in 1992.