New Director: Chiara Grabmayr

As the European migrant crisis deepens, it’s easy to become jaded by the sheer scale of the problem – something director Chiara Grabmayr has sought to overcome in Moonjourney, a spot for Munich-based refugee NGO, Perspektiven für jugendliche Flüchtlinge (PFJF). “You need to get into people’s hearts to trigger the wish for change,” says the Austrian filmmaker, who concepted, scripted and directed the film in its entirety.

Moonjourney follows a journey to claim asylum made by a father and his daughter; told through the eyes of the latter, who imagines them as astronauts on a voyage to the moon. Emerging from the ‘rocket’ (a people-smugglers’ van), they cross strange lunar terrain to reach a phosphorescent sea, ‘the place where stars are made’. But as they huddle on a dinghy for the final stretch, the engine suddenly stutters and dies. “We’re preparing for landing!” says the little girl. Pause for a beat. “I guess...” It’s an emotional sucker-punch of an ending that was, for Grabmayr, the hardest part of the filming process. “It was a very fine line to get the right tone.”

Grabmayr, who confesses to spending hours “laughing and crying in the cinema”, is not only clearly in touch with her emotions, but has a passion for storytelling – prerequisites for ending up in the director’s chair. She traces her interest in filmmaking to watching the 1971 cult movie Harold and Maude, a dark comedy about a boy’s meeting with a lively septuagenarian. “I was fascinated by the way different people’s lives and stories can affect each other. Even if it‘s just for a brief, magic moment; when your eyes meet a stranger’s on the street.”

It was such a chance meeting, while Grabmayr was at Munich’s University of TV and Film, that inspired Moonjourney. On a train back to her hometown of Vienna, she chatted to some Syrian refugees:  “One of the stories was so touching I couldn’t get it out of my mind,“ she recalls. She got to thinking about the risks refugees take and their motivation to save their loved ones. The astronaut angle in the film came from news footage she’d seen of soldiers in white plastic suits pulling refugees from capsizing boats.

Despite securing a production company, Trimaphilm, soon after writing the script, Grabmayr says it was a long slog to the shoot “with basically no money”. Casting was vital. “It was important to find the perfect girl – someone with eyes you fall in love with, someone you want to protect from harm,” she says.

In order to build a believable relationship between the father and daughter characters, Grabmayr asked the actors to play games and get to know each other slowly before shooting. Another challenge was finding European locations with an otherworldly aspect; they eventually used Spain’s semi-desert national park, Bardenas Reales, for some of the scenes.

Having scooped a Silver Screen award at this year’s YDA, what’s next for Grabmayr? Besides working on web-documentary series Fat And Fat,  which is “a portrait of Generation Y”, she hopes to direct commercials in the future. But ultimately, her goal is to make work “that has an impact on people’s lives. You have to at least try. Right?”