Austrian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Johannes Grenzfurthner joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss his two new films: Hacking at Leaves, an experimental documentary sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and rooted in the struggles of Navajo communities, U.S. healthcare failures, and hacker-led mutual aid; and Solvent, a found-footage horror film shot on his grandparents’ farm in Austria that explores buried Nazi histories and intergenerational silence. In a wide-ranging conversation, Grenzfurthner reflects on the creative processes behind both films, his collaborations with actors like John Gries, Austria’s unresolved relationship with its fascist past, and the parallels he sees between the rise of authoritarianism in Europe and the United States. The discussion expands into capitalism, technology, healthcare, political polarization, and cultural memory, revealing how Grenzfurthner uses film to probe both personal and systemic hauntings—and why he believes confronting roots, not just symptoms, is essential to understanding contemporary crises.
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Johannes Grenzfurthner:
For people who have not seen it yet, it (Solvent) is a found footage film. So it’s a point of view. So you see it from the perspective of the main character, the expat who gets hired to look for some old historic Nazi documents in an old farmhouse. There is a character played by myself who plays the grandson of that old Nazi character, who died a couple of years, or disappeared a couple of years, before the action in the film takes place. They hire a couple of historians, kind of like a salvage operator who specialized in tracking lost, hidden goods and stuff like that. They they go through the the remnants, they go through this decrepit farmhouse, trying to find the Nazi box with all the documents that the Nazi collected back in the days during the Second World War in a Polish concentration camp — and they discover more than the documents. They actually never discover the documents, but they discover more, it’s pretty much like a Nazi demon story, and I turned my own grandfather into the Nazi demon.
