Films by Bernhard Hetzenauer

Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Mexico 2023, 30 min
by Bernhard Hetzenauer

In breathtaking words, Germán López Rosales from Mexico talks about his experience during a human-smuggling operation from Mexican border town Laredo to San Antonio, Texas. Locked up inside a tractor-trailer, eight out of 39 immigrants died that day next to Germán because of extreme heat and lack of water. Two others died later in the hospital. Distant wide angle shots of the deserted Texan landscapes, suburbs and highways create a strong contrast to Germán's intimate testimony.

2022, 14 min
by Bernhard Hetzenauer

THEY WANTED TO BE LOVE is an oniric exploration of memory. Images of silent, deserted places are linked with texts that convey the narrative of a vague love story. A couple visits places in and around an unknown city. While they slowly get to know each other, the places they visit guard a memory of their encounter. The film's audiovisual form invites the spectator to enter a dream-like state of trance. Oscillating between presence, past and imagination, love is a dimension hard to grasp.

Germany, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Mexico 2019, 12 min
by Bernhard Hetzenauer, Pia Ilonka Schenk Jensen 

Consuelo's daughter Victoria was brutally murdered in Mexico City. The Birthmark visualizes the mother's inexpressible pain in blurry, abstract images, which become concrete only selectively: in macro-recordings of fleshy scar tissue and threatening pointy spikes that emphatically drill into not only the viewers' eyes, but also their bosom. (© Katalog Diagonale 2020, Michelle Koch)