Stefan Erber

Sometime, hopefully not too soon, in a place wherever but not here, all life will have moved underground after a failed uprising. Everybody wears a mask, more often than not of the variety seen only at Halloween these days. In this scary universe (that on closer inspection looks like a twisted, perverted version of our here and now...), a man with a gorilla mask is searching for a little boy with a hessian hood. His quest leads him into a maze of depravity, a pandemonium of all our nightmares and darkest desires – where something awaits that he had already given up on: love.

A man rescues a boy and later tries to get him off his back but to little avail, so they end up drifting around a subterranean world, populated by grotesque masked figures. A hundred years after Chaplin filmed his first feature film, The Kid, Norbert Pfaffenbichler offers an experimental punk-style interpretation, which the filmmaker himself has defined as a dystopian slapstick film.

There are no taboos in the grotesque underground realm of Pfaffenbichler’s 2551 movies, which cross all borders, especially those of good taste. Reviving the original punk spirit of true independent filmmaking, Pfaffenbichler and his ingenious collaborators have concocted another marvel of no-budget ingenuity.