My fathers, My Mother and Me

The Kommune that Otto Muehl created was the most influential one of the 1970’s. Its anti-authoritarian allure stemmed from the rejection of bourgeois values and rules and from a shared and open experience of sex and child raising. Former Wiener Aktivist, Muehl has been a controversial artist and a stalwart of the European counter-revolution. But at the end of the 1970’s what looked like a utopian dream went sour. The Kommune at the Friedrichshof became a living hell for the children that had to endure Muehl’s ever increasing cruelty, spanning from anarchistic-reichian sexual guru to über-Father. Paul-Julien Robert, the director of the film, was one of the children of the Kommune. On the quest for his real father, while questioning his mother who was a long standing Muehl devotee in the past, he comes to terms with a difficult and complex legacy. Carefully avoiding to demonize Muehl, even though he was later convicted for child abuse, the director accepts the fact that while he may not have had a traditional family or a father, to this day he still has one of the most amazing families ever.

Giona A. Nazzaro