Vienna before Nightfall

Story

A journey back in time to Vienna 100 years ago at the end of the Hapsburg monarchy through to the Austrian Anschluss with Nazi Germany. At the time, Vienna was Europe’s cultural capital and home to a sizeable Jewish community. The film reconstructs the spiritual metropolis through the biographies of Jewish intellectuals living and working there during the period: Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud and others. The film is also a piece of family history: Robert Bober’s great-grandfather, who ended up in Viennain 1904 after a failed attempt to emigrate to the USA, spent the rest of his life there. He died in 1929, two years before the director was born. Vienna vor der Nacht is a film essay, apoetic and very personal confrontation with the city and its Jewish life before World War II.

Director

Robert Bober (*1931 in Berlin) has won several awards as a novelist. He was assistant director to François Truffaut on films such as Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) and Jules et Jim (1962) and has made several documentaries about the consequences of the Holocaust.