HugoHugo
or The Eye of Gods

Author and director: Peter Wagner
Music: Jan Sokol

Austria 2002, 121 minutes, Independent film production.
Producer: musical guessing with WAKO-Film, Filmed on DigiBeta, 16:9
First film production of the director.
German language, english subtitles.

Story:

HugoHugo lives as a ghost-like appearance in the black and white world of a ghost train. When the ghost train visitors are asked by him, if they were so called humans, he never gets a satisfying answer.

Once a virgin like creature puts a glass ball between his feet, out of which colours sparkle. From this moment on HugoHugo picks up courage to leave the ghost train and to get to know the world of the humans. First he meets a weird person, whom he considers to be a human: the punchdollyman. He becomes HugoHugo´s constant companion. Together they get to know a whole zoo of types which are all ´human beings´, but who are still the better, the more precise and the truer ghosts: car drivers, who become revengeful monsters when being confronted with a harmless damage; policewomen, who in face of IDs (banknotes) get awfully excited; civil servants, plagued by stress and stomach ulcers; scavengers, who collect the corpses of people and transform them into energy in furnaces; old people, who take revenge for that; a circus, that offers as the highlight of the show the real self shooting oft the whole audience; a melancholy man, who looks for shelter from the rottenness of the world; and finally the punchdollyman himself, who has, in the course of time, made so much money with HugoHugo that he buys the old ghost train und transforms it into a modern punchdollyman-saloon, in which all present day scapegoats are displayed as punchdollymen.

As a personal experience from his trip into the world HugoHugo takes with him the perception, that once he himself must have been a human being with all the immanent qualities. Again he starts his journey, but this time with the intention of finding a world where everythin would be completely different ...

Background:

In the summer and autumn 2001 the film "HugoHugo or The Eye of Gods" was filmed in the small town of Güssing in South Burgenland, Austria, with 247 involved people. All of the actors were amateurs.

The director Peter Wagner says:

"I like to work with this combination of amateurs as actors and professonals working in the production, because it is a highly thrilling voyage of discovery. The work during rehearsals and on the set influences the life of the people involved so much as it comes from it. This makes me believe again and again in the importance oft the production as an artistic and sociological process. I am always astonished, how far the non professional actors dare to go on the stage or in front of the camera, how they begin to relish the feeling of alleged self-exposure – especially when given difficult tasks as to the topic and aesthetics. The trick is mainly to turn an undertaking like this into such a harmonious structure that 200 and more participants experience a temporary and joyful unity in a common responsibility."

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