Director's Commentary

»I only discovered "Fly Away Home", this wonderful book, when I was an adult and a lot happened to me at the same time: I was spellbound, enraptured, amused and above all, I learned something about the Second World War and the immediate post-war weeks in a way that no one had ever told me before.

I found here a description of everyday life during the war. It must have been like that for my mother, my grandparents and my great-grandparents. Because between the perpetrators and the victims there was the completely normal, working civilian population, which had to endure these years and had to support the children. No sooner had the Germans left than the occupiers arrived. All this leaves traces that are still felt today.

The most formative sentence from the many conversations we had with Christine Nöstlinger during the preparation was: "The weeks from "Fly Away Home", the weeks in the summer of 1945, when everything lay in ruins, were the most exciting and thrilling and perhaps even the most beautiful weeks of my childhood."

This ambivalence of war and childlike perception of what the adults perceived as a catastrophe is also essential for my film adaptation and I very much hope that this angry, stubborn, clever Christl, played in the film by Zita Gaier, will move many more children and also the children in the adults!«

Mirjam Unger

from left: producer Gabriele Kranzelbinder, cinematographer Eva Testor, the actors Zita Gaier, Bettina Mittendorfer, Lino Gaier and director Mirjam Unger