Wolfgang Simon

The Detour is about a young woman travelling through Europe in search of herself and the truth of life. It is based on meetings between goatherd Joanna and Austrian author and playwright Thomas Bernhard. Joanna is lost after her boyfriend dumps her at a Women's Relief Centre in Rotterdam. She works in a library and visits the theatre, where she first sees a play by Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard's philosophy permeates Joanna's thoughts. When Camille invites her to visit the French Pyrenees, she accepts. On the way, she decides to visit Bernhard in Austria. She attempts to start a relationship with him and thereby finds herself.

Lisa has grown up in an orphanage. She is looking forward to her adoption, as she doesn't know that her new parents are about to divorce. The Saber-toothed cat which she meets in a museum intervenes as a "feles ex machina".

Both have families, both are gripped by a perilous passion. Simon, school professor, and Helga, wife of a successful internist, get to know each other on their daily journey to kindergarten. They fall in love, but how should it go on?

With the dangerous smoothness of a tiger stalking his prey, Peter has circled the au pair Michèle. She quickly succumbs to his fascinating charisma and experiences for the first time a hitherto unknown, tender security. "I'll kill you," says Peter, as gently as cold-bloodedly. A macabre joke or a serious warning?

Geierwally is a musical comedy and a parody of traditional movies with regional background, especially the classic story of Geierwally.

In this well-photographed and sometimes confusing wartime drama, an Austrian village experiences the tragedy of war on several different levels. Within one family, the younger son is jealous of the praise his father gives to a Polish POW who is working for them under very difficult conditions. Within the village as a whole, the French, Polish, and Russian POWs are kept under guard by Nazi soldiers, creating a tense situation all around. But more importantly, the village has conspired to hide an Austrian deserter in a cave up in the mountains. This act of rebellion on the part of the deserter and the village hangs in a precarious balance that could be upset by a single traitorous comment to the Gestapo.

Within the span of 48 hours "contemporaries" encounter each other. In the middle is Max, who lost his job years ago because of his affair with the wife of an influential man. The story of an encounter which turns out badly because the people involved can't quite communicate.

Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself. Watching their scenes together, we realize how seldom, if ever before, the details of sexual intimacy have been shown in film from the point of view from a woman. Export privileges rupture over unity and never settles for one-dimensional solutions