THE WALL - A FILM BY JULIAN ROMAN PÖLSLER

So what did I finally choose to see?

     You can bet your last buck it wasn't the thrills and skills of spezial-effecz-robocops careering around with blahzing poopguns shoooting all before in foreground inferno on cloud 9 etcetera ad nauseum.

The German title of the film I saw and liked is DIE WAND* and it stars award winning actress Martina Gedeck.

The work is based on the novel DIE WAND (THE WALL) by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer (1920 - 1970). THE WALL is a best-selling novel which has been translated into 19 languages including English. The book was voted a Top 50 Book by 250,000 readers of Spiegel Magazine and in the Austrian Classics for Life list it placed 36. It has twice reached second place in the German best-seller lists; once for 30 continuous weeks. 

In short the story concerns the plight of a middle-aged woman who writes a diary of sorts on scraps of paper and card found in a hunting lodge in a remote valley in the Austrian Alps where she is trapped; this act begins as her attempt to preserve her sanity in her new life of isolation and loneliness. 

She cannot leave her location in the wilderness because of an endless invisible wall which acts as a barrier; the other side of which any human life glimpsed appears frozen in time. 

Just like the outcast white crow which appears each day on a tree outside the hunting lodge she must somehow find the will and the strategy to survive. 

Eventually, she will run out of paper and pencils . . .  

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*from this link you can click on YouTube and find more trailers; even if you don't understand spoken German it's worth a look for the spectacular mountain scenery and the Hitchcock-like atmosphere of some of the scenes; the cawing of the crows is eerily wonderful; and musical in a John Cage kind of way.