Returning from a vacation, a girl notices a boy and her world opens up a little more. Maybe this is what it means to grow up.
The director Terence Davies, the ‘singer of memory’, understood the English pub as a place of communal cohesion, where it was the music – the songs, chanted in chorus by everyone! – which sought to strengthen the bonds between neighbours and different generations. In his films, the pub is a place of aggregation where, between beers and singing, a process of class identification and union takes place. Die Sänger shares this same collective (and collectivising) spirit, locating it in the Austrian countryside. However, it does so from a distanced perspective, taking the point of view of a city family that accidentally enters a mystical territory where everything is foreign to them: the landscape, the rites, the customs. This exteriority allows us to glimpse the fissures of that town (thus circumventing any possible essentialist exoticism): alongside the community spirit is provincialism, alongside the pubescent boy is drunkenness. ‘Because beauty needs to have a reminder in it, for the salvation of men’. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
