The Waldheim Waltz
“Waldheim no, Waldheim no” shouts a crowd in the center of Vienna in 1986. Ruth Beckermann was one of the activists trying to prevent the election of Kurt Waldheim, and documented the political events with her camera. More than 30 years later, she revisits her archive and uses additional material to analyze this turning point in Austrian political culture. The film shows the web in which former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim became ensnared by concealing two years of his wartime biography. It analyses the collapse of the Austrian grand illusion: having been the first victim of the Nazis.
Ruth Beckermann studied journalism and art history in Vienna, Tel Aviv and New York, and earned her doctorate in 1977 at the University of Vienna. She contributed as a journalist to several Austrian and Swiss magazines. In 1978 she cofounded the distribution company, Filmladen, in which she was active for seven years. Since 1985 she works as a writer and filmmaker. Her film The Dreamed Ones was screened widely and won several awards. Her latest film, The Waldheim Waltz, won, among other prizes, the Glashütte-Original Documentary Award at Berlinale (2018).