Nr.7
completed
Nr.7
Mischief Films
Director | Michael Schindegger |
Script | Michael Schindegger |
Camera | Michael Schindegger |
Sound | Gailute Miksyte |
Editor | Dieter Pichler |
Producer | Ralph Wieser |
Production management | David Bohun |
Supported by | BMUKK, ORF Film/Fernsehabkommen, Stadt Wien |
Distribution | Polyfilm |
Languages | German, English, Romanian, Hebrew, Russian |
Subtitles | German, English |
Trailer
Festivals
- Diagonale 2012
- Pravo Ljudksi Film Festival 2012
Synopsis
A classic Viennese apartment building: Built around the turn of the century, a bit run down, charmingly aged wood-framed windows against a gray plaster background. At least the outside façade gleams fresh and white.
Director Michael Schindegger spent the first thirty years of his life here, in his parents’ apartment on the first floor. Now he and his Romanian fiancée Dana are getting married and moving out. ’Before that,’ he explains off-camera, ’I want to take a look around the building one last time.’ After all, even after all these years he hardly knows the neighbors. Camera in hand, he goes ringing on their doorbells.
What he finds is a piece of Viennese cultural history long believed to have disappeared. A multi-lingual, predominantly Jewish community in the building living according to its own rhythms invites the director inside to take part in their lives. The building owners’ family lives on several floors: parents, daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren. Together they run a kosher butcher shop on the ground floor, a meeting point for the Jewish community. Here sandwiches are wrapped, while next to the counter young men in baseball caps discus the importance of resting on the Sabbath. On the rooftop carpenters hammer together a pavilion for the Feast of Tabernacles.
Michael Schindegger’s documentary draws its vitality from the personal encounters between the director/cameraman and his neighbors. As a chronicler of his last few weeks ’at home’, he himself is present again and again in both sound and image, watching, asking questions and sometimes getting in the way. Precisely because the filmmaker sets out without any clear hypothesis means that he is open to every detail and therefore unearths that much more
Anyone who knows Vienna knows that the building’s residents stand for a difficult new beginning: In the period between the two world wars half of the inhabitants of Vienna’s second district, officially called ’Leopoldstadt’ and referred to as ’Mazzesinsel’, or ’Matzo Island’, in the vernacular, had Jewish roots. Today, the district’s Jewish population totals just 3,000, a significant decrease from the 60,000 who lived here during the inter-war period. Still, more and more are constantly being added.
’No. 7’ is a snapshot from 2011. A portrait of a building’s residents and their enviable and warm atmosphere. But of course the film, with its unspoken historical and political insight, is more than that.
An interview with Michael Schindegger by Maya McKechneay
No. 7 portrays the Viennese apartment building you grew up in. The documentary action in the film ends with your wedding, and the preparations for your moving out of your father’s apartment have already begun. „No. 7“ is both a documentary about a portion of your life, but also about the building and its residents. How did you come up with the idea for your project?
The jumping off point was a thought that had occupied my mind for some time: How is it that I have lived here all my life and don’t know my neighbors? At the time I talked to friends and acquaintances about this feeling, and most of them had similar experiences in Vienna. Dana, my girlfriend at the time and now my wife, is from Romania. There not knowing anything about your neighbors would be inconceivable.
So I began my search. I was curious and wanted to document my investigations.
But first I had to overcome my own feeling of embarrassment. It was kind of a paradoxical situation, after thirty years of showing no interest, just before moving out, ringing peoples’ doorbells and telling them: I want to get to know you!
However, in the film one gets the impression that without exception your neighbors received you in a friendly and open way.
Well, the faces were familiar to me from the building. As a result, me knocking on their doors was not like a complete stranger introducing himself. They knew: That’s the guy from the first floor. That was my trump card.
Did some of them still refuse to appear on camera?
Yes, there were neighbors who didn’t want to be a part of the film. For example, there was one couple who wrote a short, friendly note that they didn’t want to be included.
The building belongs to a Jewish family and most of the people who live there are also Jewish. On the ground floor is a kosher food shop that you also included in the film. Some of the tenants work there …
It’s a kosher butcher shop. The family that owns the house has been running the shop for some ten years. At the same time it’s a meeting point for the community. The customers come from a very diverse Jewish background.
Unfortunately the building owner himself declined to be in the film. But both of his daughters and sons-in-law, who all live in the building with their families, all appear in the documentary. Besides, in Orthodox Jewish families it is customary for the daughters to remain in close proximity to their families, while the sons do not.
Your own family is just the opposite. The film shows your father with his two sons in the kitchen cooking and talking with them.
Actually there’s five of us brothers. The oldest three had already moved out, and now it was my turn.
Religion is a major theme of ’No. 7’. But in your family it’s never really brought up. Did you yourself have a religious upbringing?
We kids were raised to be relatively Catholic. But my father has become more critical of the Church and more liberal, the older he gets. He is a person of faith who also goes to church, but he’s very open and interested in other faiths.
That surprises me. I had assumed that your family was part of the Jewish community in the building as well.
Really? I think that even our neighbors weren’t really sure what to think about us. There was one resident who asked weeks after we had carried out preliminary discussions about the documentary whether I was Jewish. I think he assumed that I was and then got confused because there was a lot I didn’t know.
In ’No. 7’ there are a number of situations where you’re not sure what face belongs with what family, who lives on what floor and who is related to whom. I think that’s a good thing; the audience should discover something in the film for themselves.
And if somebody thinks that I or my family is Jewish, then that’s quite interesting. Although it’s not true.
There is one indication: One time a neighbor gently, but firmly indicates to you that you should turn off the camera once the Sabbath has begun in their apartment.
After having lived in the building for such a long time I know some things, but there’s a lot I don’t know. For example, the film shows the tabernacle being built on the rooftop of the building for the Feast of the Tabernacles. Before, the celebration took place in our courtyard. There were also a number of discussions where the neighbors explain things to me, each in his or her own way. The Jewish community is multi-facetted. It’s really like a melting pot of cultures.
The building is located on Taborstrasse in Vienna’s second district, also known as ’Leopoldstadt’. Those who live in Vienna know that the area was also called ’Matzo Island’ in the past. Some 60,000 Jews lived there before 1938, today there’s just 3,000. If you are familiar with this aspect of history, it is very natural to see the community on your building as something special. Had you thought about including that historical context in the scope of the film?
I read books and did research on what the population of the area was like. I looked at telephone books, where the names suddenly changed after 1938.
The Jewish history of the second district definitely did interest me. But more so in order to understand the context for my attempt to sketch the residents of the building. I thought that if the other residents brought the subject up themselves, then it’ll be in the film. If not, then no.
We’ve discussed the content of the film, but not yet its form. Did you plan from the very beginning to take on the three-fold role of director, cameraman and protagonist?
I definitely wanted to do my own filming. After all, I’m studying film photography at the Vienna Film Academy and wanted to keep the crew as small as possible on this project so as to create a more intimate atmosphere.
I didn’t decide until relatively late to highlight my own personal story as strongly and to put myself in front of the camera.
Did you have to do a lot of persuading to get your own family to appear in front of the camera?
No, it was only difficult to decide when to record the scenes on camera. After all, I could have done the filming at any time. You always want to capture an interesting discussion on camera where the people are talking about topics relevant to the film. The question arises of whether to actively bring up the topic for the film, or because it’s important.
In your own family you opted for clearly staged moments, for example when you positioned the camera to look down on your bed when you are talking about the wedding with your girlfriend.
At the time we used an old bunk bed construction in my room to hang the camera on a tripod. On one hand the situation is staged, but on the other it is also entirely typical and real, because it took place exactly like that on many occasions. Almost every couple lies in bed after a long day and talks about things.
Your wedding plans appear throughout the film as a common thread marking the passage of time. Towards the end of the film your father-in-law arrives and wants to invite hundreds of acquaintances to the wedding because that’s the way it’s done in Romania. How did the wedding go in the end?
Great, it was really fantastic. But it was also complete insanity.