2023-06-25 05:10:52
In terms of ratings and box office earnings, he is Austria’s most successful director of the last few decades: Harald Sicherheititz. His comedies like “Mother’s Day”, “Hinterholz 8” or “Poppitz” dominate the hit parades of the most visited domestic films, his television series like “Vorstadtweiber”, “Kaisermühlen Blues” or “MA 2412” banished the masses in front of the television. This Sunday, the odds king is celebrating his 65th birthday.
Harald Sicherheititz was born in Stockholm in 1958 as the son of an AUA pilot, but he grew up in the working-class district of Favoriten in Vienna – a social character whose relief is also more than clearly reflected in most of his later works. Sicherheititz became a portrait painter of the Austrian underclass, the petty-bourgeois rabble-rouser – a master of depicting misanthropy and anarchy, which he spiced up with a dash of social criticism. First, however, the later director took up his studies in communication and political science, which he completed in 1983 – with a dissertation on the topic “How does television entertain?”.
The young Sicheritz did not celebrate his first artistic successes on TV or film, but in music, as he was also responsible for the top 10 hit “Loretta” from 1986 as bassist and lyricist for the group Wiener Wunder. At the same time, the Viennese was also working as a journalist and was involved in the ORF youth magazine “Ohne Maulkorb” in the early 1980s.
However, Sicheritz found his real vocation in the director’s chair, which he impressively climbed to in 1993 with his feature film debut “Mother’s Day” – a cult film to this day, which is also considered a co-founder of Austrian cabaret films. In doing so, Sicheritz helped later greats of the genre, such as Alfred Dorfer, Andrea Händler and Reinhard Nowak, to break through on the big screen – whereby he was to have a close artistic relationship with the former debutant Roland Düringer in particular.
The two wrote the comedies “Hinterholz 8” (1998) and “Poppitz” (2002) together – with 617,597 and 441,106 viewers respectively, the most successful and the third most successful Austrian feature film of the past 35 years. And also in the third racehorse from the Sicheritz stable, which made it to 9th place in the top ten with 272,849 spectators, “MA 2412 – Die Staatsdiener” (2003), Düringer was involved as a co-author and once more in the leading role. The director was not always able to attract the masses to the cinema with his films, but his eleventh and last work to date, the Middle East comedy “Baumschlager” with Thomas Stipsits, presented in 2017, “only” had 35,495 admissions.
However, the undeniable successes at the box office were not the only field of activity for the filmmaker booked on Humor, as Sicheritz has always been active in television in addition to his work for the screen. Legendary TV classics such as “MA 2412” – including the 2022 reprise “Weber & Breitfuss” -, the “Kaisermühlen Blues”, “Four Women and a Death” or the hit “Vorstadtweiber” are credited to him. There are also countless commercials or contributions to formats such as “Tatort”. And one of the most recent projects of the successful director also came from the crime genre, as he presented last year with “Broll + Baroni – Für immer dead” an adaptation of the Max Broll crime novels by successful author Bernhard Aichner. However, the most recent project of the long-time worker is historical, as his next feature film entitled “Bruno” is dedicated to the life story of the young Kreisky.
In 2009, Sicheritz, who survived bone cancer and a serious car accident as a fighter, was one of the co-founders of the Austrian Film Academy. And even if Sicherheititz always struggled a little with what he saw as a lack of recognition from the arts pages, cultural policy has jumped into the gap in praise in recent years. In 2013, the director was awarded the Golden Medal of Merit from the State of Vienna and in 2016 the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art.
(S E R V I C E – www.sicheritz.com)
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