Visit to Boys' Land

In her second documentary film, filmmaker Katrin Schlösser travels to southern Burgenland to shoot a film with men. She wants to find out how they think and act, what drives them, and also how she herself approaches men and what expectations she attributes to them. In the form of cinematic field research, she collects encounters and conversations, learns about individual life paths, everyday life and its burdens, and dreams. Taciturn and laconic, the men ultimately share their thoughts and feelings candidly, always in response to the curiosity, openness, and persistence of the questioner, who sits opposite them with her cell phone camera and seeks a dialogue on equal terms. With BESUCH IM BUBENLAND, Katrin Schlösser has created an empathetic, even humorous film about men and a region that, perhaps precisely because she is a stranger there, goes far beyond the individual and the local. With these men, she creates a film about encounters, about cultural and social boundaries, and yet about what connects us, what we have in common: the difficult-to-satisfy search for closeness, understanding, and exchange between people.