Another Coin For The Merry-Go-Round - EastWest Filmdistribution GmbH

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Short synopsis

Anna (Valerie Pachner) loves her youth, her friends, drugs, parties and music. She struggles with the signs, which are ever harder to overlook, that it’s time for her, too, to grow up, and does everything to escape this reality. But then a momentous event suddenly causes her routine to collapse. The story of a harsh coming-of-age with Voodoo Jürgens and appearances by Alicia Edelweiss, Bulbul and others.

Synopsis

Anna, Niko, Ilias, and Jools are flirting with the Viennese underground music scene. They like the do-it-yourself style and are trying to create something with the band BLACK CANDY, even though they do not really know how to play their instruments. They are rather familiar with the feeling of buying a skateboard at the age of almost thirty and pulling all-nighters around the Viennese Gürtel. But ever since a wheelchair has been thrust into their lives like a foreign body, something has changed. Actually, it changed much earlier. Above all, Anna finds it difficult to live with the fact that even a FUGAZI record no longer has the same power after the umpteenth run-through as it did the first time she heard it. That the needle of the record player has jumped into an endless groove in which she as a person is stuck. “If that’s reality, then I don’t want it.” They are tryinf to ignore the changes, making excuses for themselves and refusing to acknowledge that their parents no longer have spare change for the carousel and it is time to pull a coin out of their own pockets.

Technical Information

2021; Drama; Austria; 92 minutes; DCP, ProResHQ; Aspect Ratio: 1:1,85; Mix: 5.1; Original Language: German, English; Subtitles: English

Credits

Director
Hannes Starz

Scriptwriter
Hannes Starz

Artistic collaboration
Gabriele Kranzelbinder

Director of Photography
Marianne Andrea Borowiec

Editor
Hannes Starz

Music Composer
Manfred Engelmayr

Sound
Hubert Haslacher

Re-recording Mixer
Vinzenz Schwab

Costume Designer
Mave Venturin

Production
KGP Filmproduktion

Producers
Gabriele Kranzelbinder, Barbara Pichler, Hannes Starz

Cast

Anna
Valerie Pachner

Niko
Voodoo Jürgens

Jools
Tinka Fürst

Ilias
Max Bogner

Director

Hannes Starz

Hannes Starz studied German philology and theatre-, film- and media science in Vienna. He worked as an editor for BAD LUCK (R: Thomas Woschitz, 2014) and MISSING PEOPLE (R: Béla Tarr, 2019).

ANOTHER COIN FOR THE MERR-GO-ROUND is his first feature film after several music clips as director and editor.

Director’s note/Artistic

“Another Coin for the Merry-Go-Round” creates a world that tells “Paranoid Park” in the style of “Drugstore Cowboy”. Which combines the delicacy of the harsh reality of “Gummo” with the loving figure drawing by “Trainspotting”. A story that is located in the DIY underground with skate parks and crashing guitars, but conveys a feeling that shouldn’t be strange to anyone.

The heroes in “Another Coin for the Merry-Go-Round” are in their thirties, far away from reality and still trapped in their carefree bubble of their youth. They float above the ground like space travelers and, as a group, hold on to moments that pretend infinity. Anna in particular does not want to deal with the changes that life brings. For her, all the changes are just foreign objects that do not make her environment appear as it should be. Instead of coping with it, she ignores it, dubs it and basically only wants to understand why the “I” is someone else (“Je est un autre” * Arthur Rimbaud).

To tell this story, I chose a Coming of Age structure. The Viennese do-it-yourself underground and the corresponding bars have always been clear to me as a universe. These places are everywhere in the world. They are interchangeable and every place has a feeling of eternal youth. I also spent my student days in this “Neverland” and came into contact with the Viennese music scene. The do-it-yourself lifestyle of the bands always had a great effect on me and for many records the text line of the Bruce Springsteen song “No Surrender” still applies to me today: “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby / Than we ever learned in school “.

The film was shot in 10 days in September 2019. The dialogues are largely improvised. The short shooting time is of course primarily due to the low budget but was also important for the energy and spontaneity that this film is supposed to convey.