BRIGHTER THAN THE MOON (HELLER ALS DER MOND) European Showcase

Writer-director Virgil Widrich won the City of Salzburg Screenplay Award for this debut feature.

Melles, a former contractor-turned-bank robber, has enlisted the services of Romanian Knarek, whose fiancee Julie has stowed away in the trunk of his car to escape Bucharest. When Melles and Knarek manage to pull off a heist, Julie is left by the wayside; there just isn’t enough room for both her and the loot in the car trunk. Julie meets Paulo, a down-on-his-luck Italian immigrant, and they become partners in a crime of their own. All the while, Detectives Fischer and Gudrawzcuk are in not-so-hot pursuit of the bank robbers….

A charmingly wry send-up of the xenophobic sentiments re-surfacing in Austrian society, BRIGHTER THAN THE MOON highlights the desperation of modern immigrants forced into a life of crime, with often-comic results.