WHITE COAL by Georg Tiller | Austria 2015 | 70'
DOCUMENTARY
FESTIVALS
2015 Rotterdam IFF (Bright Future) ***Nominated for FIPRESCI Award***
2015 Jeonju IFF (Expanded Cinema)
2015 Dokufest Prizren ***Special Jury Mention***
2015 Festival do Rio
2015 Viennale
2015 Planeta Dok / Brazil
2015 Porto/Post/Doc
SYNOPSIS
WHITE COAL is less a film about coal, although it uses the material as its source of investigation, than an exploration into motifs of industrial films from the 1920s to the present. Loosely inspired by Hermann Melville's The Confidence Men, a story about a blind messenger aboard a Mississippi steamboat, one thread of the film follows a crew of workers on a Polish coal ship. A second thread portrays the architechture and circumstances of coal burning at the world's largest coal burning power plant, located in Taychung, Taiwan.
CREW
Director, Script Writer, Sound: Georg Tiller
Cinematography: Claudio Pfeifer
Editor: Viktor Hoffmann
Sounddesign: Jochen Jezussek
Cast: The crew of the Polish Coal Ship Bizon 58, Ladislav Gombrowicz, Grzegorz Szymánski, Miroslav Radzikowski and Franz Amann & workers and employees of the Taichung Coal Power Plant
A production of Subobscura Films (Austria) supported by Innovative Film Austria and the Austrian Film Institute
Georg Tiller, was born 1982 in Vienna, Austria.
After unfinished philosophy and theater studies, he studied film studies first with Harun Farocki at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, then film directing and cinematography with Michael Haneke and Christian Berger at the Film Academy Vienna and later film directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). Since early on he has been working as a freelance artist and filmmaker later also as a producer of his own and his friends work, initially with the artist collective naivsuper. His films have been shown at numerous film festivals around the world and he has exhibited his work at the Bienal de Såo Paulo, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Luleå Vinter Bienal among many other places. He is one of the co- founders of the production company Mengamuk Films and managing director of Subobscura Films. Georg currently lives in Vienna and Berlin.
FILMOGRAPHY
2015 White Coal – 70 min
2014 DMD KIU LIDT – 55 min
2011 Persona Beach – 140 min
2010 Vargtimmen – nach einer Szene von Ingmar Bergman – 7 min
2008 Der Turm des Ornithologen – 13 min
2007 km 43.3 Der transsylvanische Holzfall 43 min