Night of a 1000 Hours

Just before mother is to transfer the family business and the accompanying imposing mansion to her son, she collapses. This is fortunate for her other son because he is in danger of losing out owing to his far-right sympathies. Yet her death turns out to be not as final as hoped; as she signs her will a little later, other dead relatives appear. Everyone apart from Hermann Ullich, the head of the family, who died in 1945 in Vienna in a bombing raid. At least, that’s what people thought. During a long night, more and more indications emerge that history actually took a very different course.
Virgil Widrich, whose previous feature Heller als der Mond (2000) had its premiere in Rotterdam competing for a Tiger Award, does not allow himself to be hemmed in by something as banal as reality in this lighthearted murder mystery. Dead people walk into the room as if they have never been away. How passé is the past?, the film seems to ask. There are certainly a couple of old political ghosts that have certainly not yet come to rest.