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One of us
Cast & Crew
- DirectorStephan Richter
- Producer
- ScreenwriterStephan Richter
- Director of photography
- Main Cast
- Editor (Cut)
- Sound Design
- Original Score
- Production Design
- Costume Design
Director's comment
A 14-year-old boy dies one night in a supermarket’s colourful world of merchandise. This disturbing image would haunt me long after opening a daily newspaper in 2009 and learning about a story that, for many weeks, was heatedly discussed in Austria.Inspired by these events, ONE OF US narrates a complex cosmos of characters that inhabit the sterile aisles of product shelves and the giant cement-grey parking lot of a supermarket. All characters encounter the 14-year-old teenager Julian who, with curiosity and naïveté, seeks adventure in this rigidly organised consumerist world.
The supermarket itself is a quiet observer as well as a stoic protagonist from which any kind of human impulse ricochets. A classic anti-space, the supermarket might generate a vast array of desires, but won’t permit neither personal stories nor identities. As the silent witness of a tragic crime, the supermarket is victorious in a narrative from which all participants emerge as losers. With this uncanny presence, the supermarket becomes a metaphor for a global system of society that has stopped functioning long ago – it constantly faces the ultimate collapse. The giant worlds of shelves, filled with lurid and empty promises, shape the film’s central narrative perspective onto a story on identity, friendship, love, acknowledgement, and the boredom of the suburbs.
The adult characters therein mostly function as trusting servants of the system, keeping a late capitalist lie alive even though it never offers them fulfilment.
It’s this very fact that makes the story of the innocent boy – who succumbs to this system so senselessly – so unbelievably tragic. People are primarily consumers, and apparently only youths and their aimless-yet-stirring rebellion are the living.
ONE OF US should furthermore mirror a piece of Austrian zeitgeist, which one will primarily find in the rural cement deserts of the suburbs. Through this film, viewers will hopefully have an opportunity to see this strange world with new eyes.
Biography
Stephan Richter was born in Dresden and studied Media Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He graduated in 2007 and therefore shot his first experimental short film OUT OF BOUNDS as a diploma thesis. The movie was shown at several international film festivals. Since then he has been working as a media artist, scriptwriter and director in Vienna.After several music videos and experimental shorts, Stephan Richter received the STARTER AWARD FOR FILM ART (Austrian Ministry of Culture and Arts) and started to work on his first feature film project ONE OF US. He met Arash T. Riahi, who supported the project as dramaturgical advisor and producer.
In 2013 ONE OF US was part of the EKRAN training programme in Warsaw (Wajda Film School) and was also nominated for the "Project Pitch Award" at the "Kino der Kunst Festival" (Cinema of Art Festival) in Munich.
Cast & Crew
Stephan RichterArash T. Riahi, Karin C. Berger
Stephan Richter
Enzo Brandner
Jack Hofer (Julian), Simon Morzé (Marko)
Andreas Wodraschke, Julia Drack
Hjalti Bager-Jonathansson
Maja Osojnik, Matija Schellander
Julia Oberndorfinger, Christine Dosch
Monika Buttinger
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