Woodland

“Both female characters, in the film as well as in the novel, are united by one thought: What happens when my system collapses? This is a question that preoccupies all self-employed people and, even more intensely, women who are also single mothers.

I wanted to trace this fear and, on the other hand, to see which resources—often forgotten in everyday urban life because we don’t need them—we have at our disposal. Another aspect is the unromantic facet of escaping, this forced exit from familiar urban everyday life: in the novel, it’s the financial crisis; in the film, it’s not being able to cope in the city after the trauma of the terrorist attack. In the course of the scriptwriting process, I moved away from the original material. But I still put the material in the drawer for a few months because I couldn’t find the key to my main character. She remained a stranger to me. Then, shortly after the terrorist attack in Vienna, I rewrote the screenplay within just a few weeks, and everything fell into place.”

Elisabeth Scharang