A documentary by Fritz Ofner
Directed, produced, filmed and edited by Fritz Ofner.
A 2012, 70 min, HD Video, Arabic with English Subtitles.
Production: Friedrich Ofner Filmproduktion
Funded by: Stadt Wien Kultur und Innovative Films Austria
A road trip through Libya during the last weeks of the revolution against Muammar al-Gaddafi’s regime. Libya Hurra documents a collective mood characterizing people in one particular place in a narrow time window. Without losing itself in facts and statements, the film outlines realities of life in long sequence takes shot during an armed revolution, which usually – even from a country in the focus of media reporting – remains completely hidden. At the end of Libya Hurra, the filmmaker stands in front of Gaddafi’s former palace. The revolution is over and the time window closed again.
Critics verdicts
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“That is what gives this unpretentious documentary its quality: it likely teaches us more than many reports. For it focuses on speech — the voices of fighters on both sides, and those of ordinary people caught up in a conflict that both overwhelms and mobilizes them. It therefore leaves this speech entirely to its interlocutors. Entirely self-financed, the film stems from the desire to be present where History is being made. By placing his subjectivity at the service of the people he films, rather than at the behest of an ideological discourse or a formulaic analysis, Ofner allows us to feel, in a very human way, something of what mobilized this country to rid itself of its dictator.”
Olivier Barlet
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“There is great humility for the reality without any preconceived ideas or statements…. It is a very pure illustration of the idea that “the World is what happens” as Ludwig Wittgenstein would have said.”
Hassouna Mansouri
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“It is hard to believe how powerful an impression of reality — and how unsettling a sense of truth and contradiction — Ofner’s patient, wordless observations convey. Where he saw the gleam of freedom in the eyes of the rebels, he also saw the gleam of fanaticism.”
Christoph Schneider, Tagesanzeiger
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“The immediate effect is that of witnessing a story that has not yet been told in all its complexity — a fundamental piece of a much broader revolution that will need to be told over time. Libya Hurra is a film that draws its strength from its immediacy and rekindles interest in the situation of a country once again on the brink of unpredictable change. It is a valuable document by a committed and attentive filmmaker, whom one would like to see return to Libya to portray the complex and far from painless phase of transformation currently underway.”
Roberto Rippa, Rapporto confidenziale
Festivals:
- 65. Locarno Film Festival – Semaine de la critique
- Crossing Europe Linz
- Split Film Festival
- Doc Lisboa
- Paris – Signes de Nuit
- Warsaw – Watch Docs Film Festival
- Diagonale Graz
- Luxor African Film Festival
- Innsbruck International Film Festival