Director Wolfgang Glück passed away | Association of Film Directors Austria, December 17, 2023

2023-12-17 22:16:06

The Austrian Film Directors Association mourns the loss of its founding member

Vienna (OTS) – On December 13th One of the quietest and most modest greats of Austrian cinema passed away at the age of 94. The Austrian Film Directors Association is in deep mourning for one of its founding members, Wolfgang Glück, an empathetic and solidary person who remained connected to the association until the end. At a ceremony in 2019 to mark the association’s 30th birthday, Glück appeared to be joyfully touched on the stage of the “Odeon”: “I wouldn’t have imagined that such a celebration would still think of me a bit. Thank you all for listening and watching. It was a wonderful life.”

At the first and only career-spanning retrospective of Wolfgang Glück’s work by the Filmarchiv Austria in 2017, fellow director Paul Poet, as the responsible curator, wrote the following words: “The filmmaker as a gentleman. Elegance. Joke. Sophistication. A man of the world, his index finger raised under the ice cream leather, winking. Wolfgang Glück’s career is like no other. The Austrian dances mischievously back and forth between large festivals and small television plays, becoming a pioneer of literary arthouse cinema, of coming to terms with the past on the big screen, of TV theater with class, of experimental educational television. He was also a wonderful pioneer of European genre films. Max Ophüls, Lubitsch, Bergman, they were the inspiration for Glück’s subtle, well-read style. A big signature for a small country, which even led to the first domestic Oscar nomination in 1987 with “38 – that was Vienna too.”

In 1972, Jörg Eggers began the “Working Group of Austrian Filmmakers”, which was to be joined by Axel Corti, Wolfgang Glück and others, an original act from which the Austrian film funding, the umbrella organization of filmmakers, the Diagonale, the Austrian Film Commission should take their early impetus, and from which the Austrian Film Directors Association emerged in its current form in 1989 as a direct result.

The current board, Kurdwin Ayub, Severin Fiala, Jasmin Baumgartner, Paul Poet, Günter Schwaiger, Georg Tiller, expresses their condolences to the bereaved and those accompanying them.