December 20th – Single Bells

For the full Movie Advent Calendar click here.

Writing a blog in English has one regrettable downside – recommending movies in your mother language is difficult in English – especially Austrian movies which are already incomprehensible for people from Germany left alone any other country.

Especially the Austrian accent and culture is so very specific it is hard to translate a fracture of it. Nevertheless a Christmas without Single Bells is no Christmas. The movie tells the story about traditions, relatives, annoying grandmothers – everything held together by the Austrian “why should we give a damn”-mentality.

If I have to choose a moment it would be any moment where the late Inge Konradi she portrays the character of the grumpy grandmother so perfectly it is uncanny. There are so many moments in Single Bells with her feeling as if they were taken right out of real life – so much there is a warning at the beginning of the movie that this story is entirely fictional and any connection to any relatives is purely coincidential.