IT'S THERE

Doors, graves, handwritten cardboard signs, a bustling marketplace – and, time and again, the gaze of a young woman: Such are the images Friedl vom Gröller has composed into a poetic étude about a quest for true understanding.

At the start, a young woman sits in an overgrown garden, peacefully lost in thought – namely the singer Jelena Arrouas who previously acted in Friedl vom Gröller’s film Jelena (2024): Suddenly, something unsettling seems to grab the young woman's attention. What could it be? The next moments find us in a cemetery, looking at open and closed doors. The camera surveys the cracked ground — searching for what? Perhaps it is an answer to the protagonist's handwritten question recurringly appearing in fragments and variations in French and German on cardboard signs? The longest version reads: “I wanted to know everything. I wanted to view everything from above, to see everything, to observe everything, to understand everything, to grasp everything, to register everything, see everything, see everything, know everything. Know everything.” A utopia doomed to failure?

The past tense suggests that the search for the “everything” to be grasped from a bird’s-eye view has since been abandoned in favor of a new approach: “I wanted to open the door, I opened the door, it is here, right in front of me; I’ve opened everything, everything is here, right in front of me, right here. It’s here.” The hustle and bustle of a marketplace brings us back to the reality of everyday life.

Perhaps IT'S THERE can also be understood as a coming-of-age story in miniature: from a young woman’s Faustian aspirations to the realization that true insight is impossible without an open mind. (Nina Schedlmayer)

Translation: Eve Heller