"Die Beste aller Welten" (The best of all worlds) the winner of the Film Festival of this year, has been a surprising revelation which left the viewers in astonishment especially for its autobiographical aspect.                                             

It is the powerful story of the film director’s childhood (Adrian Goiginger) who had to grow up faster than he was expected to because of his mother's drug addiction. This film is an extreme declaration of love between a mother and her son whose strength managed to save her.                                                               

In fact, despite the tragedy of his life, Adrian wants us to perceive that love can defeat anything. Through his story, he makes us realise that hope and imagination can destroy the monsters we are tormented by.                                     

Moreover, the director's ability lies definitely in how he discovers the positive aspects of his experience in order to underline the neverending possibility of redemption and the courage typical of a female in overcoming every obstacle as can be seen in the last scene in which maternal love triumphs over addiction. At last this deep love manages to offer Adrian a "normal" life and a happy childhood.                                                             The acting is great because of the authenticity. In particular, the young Adrian, played by Jeremy Miliker, who was the real revelation of the cast.                                                                   Furthermore, the director perfectly underlines the intensity of the atmosphere by making large use of music. In fact, Goiginger strategically alternates moments of pause and silence which contribute to increase suspense and authenticity.                                                                                               "In some scenes I didn't want to insert the music in order to underline the bitterness and the hardness of the moment" as the director himself said.                                                                                         

This movie is really touching and it has left us something to think about.

"The best of all worlds" is an autobiographical film by Adrian Goiginger set in the Austrian city of Salzburg. It tells the story of a child, whose mother Helga is in trouble because of an addiction to heroine, and how this woman is able to stop taking drugs.

        Although the viewpoint of the commentator is rather impersonal, the innocent and tender vision of the child makes the viewer forget the cold narrative tone. The film director, Adrian himself, wants to convey his deep concerns about this afflicted mother who is powerless to freely love her child. Even if there is no condemnation of the  mother’s lifestyle and attitudes. Isolation and insanity induced by drugs are somehow accepted by the child as a status quo, a matter of fact. As his life experience has been too short, little Adrian cannot really understand how dreadful his mother’s life is. Yet, he can “feel” it. He knows, better than anyone else, the demon that turns men and women into angry and violent or passive and apathetic human beings. For Adrian, this demon is particularly represented by one of the characters: “the Greek”, a drug dealer. Adrian’s mother and her friends are basically, in the child’s mind, good guys but they are led astray by the bad influence of the Greek.

        In his childlike vision, Adrian sees vague hopes of a better and happy life for his mother and himself but he cannot see that his condition is far from being normal. He does not know how people  become addicted to drugs, he cannot realise that he, Adrian, is the only possible future for his mother, her only possibility of redemption. In this hell though, the child understands the redemptive power of friendship. Despite their condition, his mother’s friends love Adrian: They all regard him as an innocent presences and a possibility for a better future.

        The worst characters of the story, in the child’s eyes, are the institutions, paradoxically called—by the drug-addicted—“undead” because of their alleged inability to understand their needs, problems, and conditions. The doctors, the police, the school are symbols of an unfit and inept society, indifferent to the problems caused by drugs. On the other side, the Christian community is seen as the one who really tries to save people from drug addiction.

        One of the most interesting features of this film is the parallelism between the two worlds in which the main characters take refuge: The mother in heroine, the son in his imagination. Both these worlds are sought as a way to freedom, but only Adrian’s world gives hope (as we know that he will eventually fight the demon and become an adventurer).

        So, in conclusion, what is the “best of all" these “worlds”? For Adrian the answer is “love”, as only through love there is hope of a better world.

“THE BEST OF ALL WORDS”  di Adrian Goiginger

di Benedetta Bacchi; Giovanna Deriu; Elisabetta Dramis, Carlotta Carrus

A night out doors, bonfires, sleeping bags, a found arrowhead on which wondering thousand of adventures and drugs: that’s the reality in which Adrian lives, a seven year old boy that lives with an addicted mother. “However, this is not a story about addiction, this is a story about love”, that kind of love that makes you change, that makes you feel alive. The world of Adrian is trapped between the side of the living people and the side of the undeads, and both of them are projected in his dreams, such as the figure of the warrior and the figure of the demon, that are in a never ending fight. But Adrian’s fantasies are not so distant from the reality of his life, in fact even though he’s young and naive, he feels the insanity that pervades the souls of his mother and her friends. But, the powerful bond that connects Adrian and Helga, his mother, keeps her from falling completely apart and makes her try to give her child a normal youth, even though it is not normal at all: he breaks the rules, he smokes, he brings firecrackers to school and makes them explode. Day after day, he gets in danger, and only when he seriously risks his life, his mother notices that her lifestyle has influenced her child, even if she didn’t want to, and she finally understands that this strong bond between them, has prevented her from leaving Adrian and detoxing. But she can’t allow this anymore: she has to take care of herself, before it’s too late. After being parted for a long time, we could think that the relationship between them would have ended, maybe because Adrian had felt like he had been forsaken and betrayed by the only person he had ever loved. However, the last scene deranges every expectation, giving us an unexpected but hoped happy ending. 

5B    24/11/2017