Director Kreutzer does not want to withdraw “Corsage”.

Kreutzer said she is currently in a “permanent state of panic” and feels “terribly bad”. The shooting of “Corsage” was over when the rumors regarding Teichtmeister, who had to answer in court in February for possession of files with sexual depictions of minors and minors, came up. She met him twice in preparation for the film and shot with him for eleven days. “My connection with Teichtmeister doesn’t go beyond that,” she said. On the set he “remained aloof to a certain extent”.

She found out regarding the allegations through anonymous media reports. She then emailed Teichtmeister to ask what the rumors were regarding. Teichtmeister “clearly denied it,” said Kreutzer. He was not involved in the press work for “Corsage”. Nevertheless, they appeared together at some premieres. “Of course you can say that we might have actively prevented that. But that’s where we get into the problematic area of ​​how to deal with rumours. There’s no protocol for that either, not even a moral one,” says the director.

She doesn’t want to withdraw the film, following all, Teichtmeister is just one of many people involved in the film. “Years of work and a lot of love from many people have gone into ‘Corsage’. That’s why it hurts so much that the film will always be tainted with these horrible deeds,” says Kreutzer.

“Corsage” is still in the running for the foreign Oscar. He is currently on a shortlist of 15 foreign language films. Which five films will be nominated will be decided on Tuesday. “Until a few days ago we were of course hoping for a nomination. Now I don’t know what I should wish for,” Kreutzer told the “SZ”.

A second, unnamed “Corsage” actor is facing allegations of sexual harassment. He went public through his lawyer, denying the allegations and insisting that his name remain unnamed. Compared to the current issue of the news magazine “profil”, Kreutzer stated that this actor had assured her in many conversations that there were no criminally relevant allegations once morest him and that he had never acted offensively. The fact that he has now spoken regarding his lawyer is “good and right”. She can understand that he does this without naming names, “but it doesn’t help his colleagues on the set very much. They currently have to live with the fact that all the men who worked on this film are under suspicion,” says Kreutzer.

She also noted in “profil” that the industry still lacks rules and codes of conduct for the “difficult handling of public but anonymous allegations of sexual harassment by members of a film team outside of a production”. The film industry urgently needs to work on this, said the director.

Kreutzer has been working on a new film material since September 2020 and, under the working title “Johnny Maccaroni”, is dealing with a topic similar to the Teichtmeister cause. The planned project, for which Kreutzer received funding for story development in 2021, is regarding a woman who is one day visited by the police because her husband has published a photo of their child in a dark web chat group in which the Sharing men on how best to abuse a child.

“I wanted to do what I can: namely, to tell a story in order to sharpen perception or to create awareness of the topic,” Kreutzer explained to the “SZ”. The research turns out to be “hard and painful”. Again and once more she was unsure whether the film would even come regarding.

Kreutzer will comment on the Teichtmeister case for the first time today, Sunday evening, as part of a live discussion on ORF III (7:20 p.m.) on television. Also in “Im Zentrum” on ORF 2 (10:10 p.m.), the cause is the subject of the discussion “Sexual harassment, abuse and violence – looking the other way as a cultural principle?”. In “kulturMontag” (January 23, from 10:30 p.m.) Kreutzer and the lawyer for the Burgtheater, Bernhard Hainz, commented in interviews. Sociologist Meike Lauggas from the “#we_do” contact and advice center, psychiatrist Heidi Kastner and film producer Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu have been announced for a live discussion.