Dance and get him!

Aleks, David, and Miki, fighters from the youth center, want to discover the recipe for success of Austrian champion in Mixed Martial Arts, Philipp Schranz. The young filmmakers Lorenz and Philipp see a hero in Franz-Josef Huainigg, a representative to the National Assembly despite his physical handicaps. The emerging journalist Fatih interviews Franz Viehböck, the first and hitherto only Austrian in outer space and Max Schrems, who successfully sued Facebook. Stefan, who grew up as the son of two lesbians, admires his sperm donor father; and the young soccer player Daniel dreams about David Alaba, Austria´s most popular football star at the moment.
Tina Leisch´s documentary Dance and get him! presents fifteen Viennese boys and young men from extremely different situations with different languages spoken at home and varying amounts of seed money for the realization of their very different dreams. They ask themselves questions, such as: who am I? How am I? How do I imagine my life? Does my father´s generation still serve as a role model?

Whether talking about penis sizes, pornos, sexual harassment, or fluid gender borders, the young men express themselves in front of the camera with an often astonishing honesty and great interest in self-reflection on themes that are frequently embarrassing for young people. From everyday observations, talks about their own feelings and sometimes disillusioning encounters with their role models, the realization arises that "masculinity" is a word best used only in the plural. Dance and get him! does not place value on either representative completion or moral judgment of its protagonists. In this way, the individual episodes are able to condense that much more effortlessly to a cinematic round dance about Zeitgeist, a discourse shaped by the lightness of its staging, on gender relations and the brief period of youth. "Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee," said Muhammad Ali. Aleks translates this into Viennese dialect: "Dance and get him!" Muhammad Ali would most definitely have liked that.

(T. A., Elisabeth Streit)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt