Florian Kofler spent his childhood holidays at seaside resorts on the Adriatic coast very like the ones shown in Vista Mare (the documentary he co-directed with his partner Julia Gutweniger and which receives its world premiere in Locarno’s Semaine de la Critique). These are places where, behind the scenes, small armies of cleaners, labourers, kitchen staff, waiters and security guards work long hours to ensure that everything runs smoothly for the holiday makers.
Before embarking on the film, the Austrian-based filmmakers had already worked together on a related project – a video installation about Italian lifeguards.
“We decided to dig deeper,” Kofler says of the decision to spend months in the seaside resorts, both when the resorts were empty and at the height of the season last summer.
“The winter, the pre-season, the season and after the season,” Gutweniger lists the different periods when they were there. They talk of the eerie experience of “emptiness” and of time “standing still” in the weeks before the tourists arrived – and of the mounting anticipation as final preparations are made. “You could feel it coming,” Kofler says of the visitors who would very soon be arriving in their masses.
This isn’t a guerrilla-style verité documentary full of handheld shots taken on the move. It is filmed in surprisingly correct fashion, with careful framing.
“That is our formal decision, that we filmed from a tripod most of the time. I think there are four or five shots that are not on a tripod but the rest is,” says Gutweniger. She talks of the desire to “have this calmness” amid all the chaos of the beach resort at its busiest.
“We wanted to stand still and watch,” Kofler adds. “Everything was rushing and craziness but we wanted stay still in a certain way.”
The filmmakers shot large amounts of material. They started with a pre-set plan but often relied on “the luck of the documentary maker,” stumbling across many incidents which they then decided they had to include. Like the workers in the resorts, they were reacting spontaneously to events around them – “the weather, the tourists, the mood of the tourists…it was challenging for us but it paid off really.”
“We stayed directly in the resorts…to be in the middle of it,” Gutweniger points out.
Early sequences are similar to those found in Austrian director Ullrich Seidl’s recent dramatic feature Rimini (2022), about an ageing pop star holed up in an out-of-season seaside resort. Vista Mare was shot in some of the same locations but Gutweniger and Kofler weren’t in any way influenced by Seidl’s movie, which they only saw much later.
“We are tourists too,” Kofler dismisses the idea that the documentary takes a satirical or hostile view of the holidaymakers. “We weren’t that much interested in the tourists themselves, but this world we wanted to show does not exist without tourists.”
The two directors explore the strange labour dynamics of the resorts. Families, couples and friends have only a week or two of vacation every year. When they come to the resorts, they’re looked after by workers whose existence they seem hardly to notice. At times, it’s as if these workers are invisible or that they exist only behind the scenes.
On location, Gutweniger does the camera work while Kofler is in charge of the sound. They then oversee the editing together.
Ask the directors what was the biggest challenge in making the film and they both talk about their new family situation. They have a very young daughter who was only a few months old when they embarked on the project. They had to look after her at the same time as planning the shoot. “That was the challenge for us, to adapt to this new situation of having a child, being there [at the resorts] and working all the time,” says Kofler. They recruited a babysitter, “a brilliant lady,” but even so, she wasn’t available all the time and the work was unrelenting.
“The season was intense …it’s kind of short and you don’t want to miss anything,” Gutweniger explains why they were constantly on standby.
Some of the film is shot at night-time as the tourists go dancing and partying – and as the resorts’ employees cater to their every need. The filmmakers were startled by how hard these employees had to work – but they had an equally tough schedule themselves.
The duo aren’t puritanical. They acknowledge that being a tourist, “in bathing suits, walking around with your flip-flops, is really fun…it’s funny and absurd.”
Recent documentaries, for example Magaluf Ghost Town, show the wildest excesses of vacations in seaside resorts, complete with, drinking, brawling, sex and, all too often, vomiting. There is little of this behaviour in Vista Mare.
“It [the drunkenness and bad behaviour] is present of course but it was not really our focus,” Kofler says, pointing out these were family resorts which had strict regulations.
The filmmakers, who live in Linz, are part of artists’ collective Vila Mondeo. They made Vista Mare in partnership with Innsbruck-based Eutopia and Italian outfit, Albolina Film.
Austrian distributor Filmladen will be releasing Vista Mare in 2024. In the meantime, the film will continue its festival journey after Locarno.
“And I am sure we’ll be doing screenings in these resorts,” Gutweniger says. “We are really looking forward to it because we spent slouch time with the guys there. It is going to be fun to watch it together with them,” her partner adds.
What are the pair’s upcoming projects? “The most current is the next baby,” Kofler jokes. The child is due around New Year. “It was really intense finalising this film, so we didn’t really have the time develop some new stuff,” he ends.
