Clara Trischler | Austria, 2024, 79'
A small indigenous Mexican village is slowly turning into a ghost town as many of its inhabitants emigrate. To survive this, they start simulating an experience they all know: crossing the border to the US illegally. The residents of the village slip into the roles of border guards, human traffickers and drug smugglers to reenact the crossing for paying tourists so they can put themselves into the position of a migrant for one night. A story of empowerment or a village stuck in the loop of their traumatic experiences?
After studying at the European Film College in Denmark, Clara Trischler (*15.02.1986) lived in Israel for a year, where, in addition to her work at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Documentation Archive, she collaborated on films and film festivals and wrote articles about everyday life in Jerusalem. After several film and festival jobs in Berlin and New York, she completed screenwriting studies at the Vienna Film Academy and the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte Buenos Aires, rediscovering her love for documentary film (which began with Hi8 camera experiments as a teenager). This led her to Berlin, where she studied documentary directing at the Konrad Wolf Film University in Babelsberg. She lives and works in Berlin and Vienna.
