Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Austria but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Austria
Movie: Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl
Director: Johannes Grenzfurthner
Year: 2014
The Elevator Pitch: After the Google Wars very little remains of the world but a newspaper magnate who feels his power is threatened by a growing DIY movement sends two reporters to the far flung reaches to get an interview with Echsenfriedl, the personality all the nerds in the DIY movement have coalesced around.
How Was the Movie?:
This film is a total ride from start to finish. It’s not the film for everyone as it is a leftist micro budget guerilla film made by a leftist art collective but my SO and I absolutely loved it. Part satire of modern movements and part absurdist play the movie gets off to a slow start but by the time our main characters were dumped into an old mining town and confronting a woman dressed like the love child of an pharaoh and an emergency blanket who had lost her leg to her jealous lover, the presumed inventor of modern type who had set the entire adventure in motion, I was all in on the movie.
It’s kind of sad in a way because this movie was made a decade ago and it feels like in some ways we’re worse off than where the movie posits civilization would be after the Google Wars. The movie does a great job of balancing some hope that nerds, tech enthusiasts, and people who want to live in a just world might break through the modes of modern media, bureaucracy, and calcifying forces in our culture with DIY spirit, at least to some extent. (I say all this as I type of Pillowfort which itself is seeking to disrupt the model of the most popular social media so obviously I’m an optimist about the outcome here).
If you like B-movies, if you like art, if you like leftist ideas, and if you have an hour you can watch this one on YouTube for free.
What was for Dinner?:
Obviously there’s quite a lot of really famous Austrian foods but I kind of became enamored with the idea that fried chicken (backhendl) actually seems to be a hyper popular dish in Austria so I decided to make that with a very traditional Erdäpfelsalat and a Gurkensalat where I cheated and used to the same marinade to save time. I don’t generally make fried chicken and this reminded me of why – deep frying is a mess, possibly dangerous, and also I ended up putting the chicken in the oven for an extra 10 minutes because it was too thick to cook through at the temperature I got my oil up to. The Austrian version is basically very simple but there’s really nothing to complain about, fried chicken is delicious and the sides were perfectly fine.
For dessert I made Powidltascherln which are “plum pockets”. I actually ate these last time I was in Vienna at a restaurant that only took cash so I had to send my husband out to the ATM and stay at the table as collateral which meant we ended up deciding to order some dessert. These are basically not sweet dumplings who dough is made of a mix of potato and flour filled with sweet plum jam and topped with sugary breadcrumbs – I promise it’s actually way better than it sounds. I was pretty impressed that I was able to boil these without them breaking because I had my doubts that the dough would hold together. I think they were basically identical to the ones I had a few years ago so I’m going to give myself an A+ for that.
All in all this was a fantastic meal that we had with a bottle of Grüner Veltliner (of course).
That’s it for Austria, see you next in Kenya!