22nd Annual European Union Film Festival
- The Tobacconist
- Der Trafikant
- Austria/Germany2018
- Nikolaus Leytner
- 108 DCP
- NR
Screening Dates
- November 22, 2019 8:30
“A stunning recreation of the late 1930s in Vienna … Ganz makes Freud wise and vulnerable at the same time.”
Stephen Farber, Hollywood Reporter
Iconic arthouse thesp Bruno Ganz (Downfall, Wings of Desire), who died in February of this year, portrays psychoanalytic sage Sigmund Freud in Austrian director Nikolaus Leytner’s stately, sensitively rendered coming-of-age drama. Based on the eponymous book by Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler, The Tobacconist concerns 17-year-old Franz (Simon Morzé), a rural naïf dispatched to Vienna to apprentice at a smoke shop patronized by Communists, Jews, and a certain cigar-chomping psychoanalyst on the eve of Austria’s annexation into Nazi Germany. Smitten with a fetching music-hall dancer (Emma Drogunova), the romantically inexperienced Franz seeks the advice of Dr. Freud to win her affection. Anti-Semitism and Nazi espousal, meanwhile, swallow the city.
