Mutzenbacher

For more than a hundred years, the novel, Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, has been the subject of controversy for its lustful depiction of child and female sexuality. Though published anonymously, the novel has over the years been attributed to the Austrian writer, Felix Salten (the author of Bambi), and despite being banned for a period has also been celebrated as a world-renowned work of Viennese literature.
With an ad in a newspaper, Ruth Beckermann announces a casting call for a film based on the well-known pornographic novel: “Looking for men between the ages of 16 and 99.” Shot in a former coffin factory, the film, Mutzenbacher, sees a hundred readers confronted with excerpts from the text. And just as in real life, reading these “offensive” passages on the set evokes not only personal memories and erotic fantasies, but also reactions of denial, rejection, self-distancing and strategies of justification. We live and love in an age when sex is more ubiquitous than ever, and yet at the same time is met with a highly charged moral environment.

"An audition for men aged between 16 and 99. There are no props nor make-up, just pure improvisation. All that is required is the willingness to engage openly with the topic and language of the words on the page. No small challenge, since the text in question is the scandalous novel published anonymously in 1906 Josefine Mutzenbacher, or the Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself which, as this film confirms, continues to be the subject of passionate and controversial discussions about desire, even today. What might be world-class pornographic literature for some is seen by others as an abusive depiction of child sexuality. In an intelligently arranged, experimental setting that permits analysis, emotion, reflection and intimacy in equal measure, these men transcend the boundaries of literary debate, opening up insights for us and for themselves into the cosmos of eroticism and sexuality – both within and beyond the confines of male fantasy. A cinematic experiment poised between imagination and identity that neither negates nor invokes its central taboo. For this reason it tells us a lot, not least about “#Me” as well as #MeToo."
(Berlinale)