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Replay
Robert Brenneis would have loved to become a rock star. Today he's a music teacher. The painful difference is harming his lust for life. What once looked like future is no more than yesterday's farce. Everything is getting on his nerves – his job, his family, even the imminent summer vacation in Italy. The only thing Brenneis still enjoys is his guitar collection, a mirror of his self-pity. 

Pokorny, however, did well. People come in flocks to every beer tent between Munich and Vienna to hear him sing exactly what they want to hear. He has dumped all his ideals – and laughs all the way to the bank, instead.
Pokorny is a friend from way back. One who used to be like Brenneis. Once. Now Pokorny is a star. And Brenneis still longs to be one. To old for rock 'n roll, too young to die?

Such a dilemma strains the brain. At least until Brenneis finally plucks up the courage to go meet Pokorny, backstage, after yet another stupid triumph. The night is cool, enthusiastic, drunken at first, then sober. The next morning Brenneis understands. Even successful people might end up as losers. And maybe this works the other way round, too...

Musical midlife crisis, or: life as a guitar solo no one wants to hear. Replay is one of those comedies where a joke doesn't ask for hilarious laughter to hit home. A cross-section through the values of an enlightened audience which ridicules „Austropop“ just as acerbic as the essentials of the liberal middle class and Vienna's artsy-fartsies.

HS  
My second feature film. There's this nice saying about second films – „you get a lifetime to spend on the first one, and only two years, at best, for your second one.“ I didn't want to follow up with the same means that had made Mother's Day so successful. Replay attempts to transmit that it might more rewarding to live with the world, rather than against it. To me, as a long-time rock musician, the setting was particularly attractive.