The Holy Land Tyrol

[Wolfie65]

I found this by pure chance at my local media store for $ 2, and since foreign films are hard to find in these parts and I'm back replenishing my Nappies, I figured it would make for some good inspiration. The story takes us to Augsburg in 1809, where Franz from Tyrol has just started an apprenticeship in the house of a physician. Katarina, the doctor's daughter, falls in love with him, and after Franz becomes a master, the doctor consents to the marriage. After an altercation with a French officer, they flee to his family's mountainside farm in the Alps, where the Bavarian girl receives a far less than warm welcome and subsequently get caught up in the uprising against French and Bavarian occupation, led by innkeeper Andreas Hofer.
The film is a German-Austrian-Italian co-production, and as a European film, it is much grittier, more realistic and far less 'spectacular' than most American productions would be. There aren't any battle scenes, and uniformed soldiers are few and far between, it's really more of a family saga set against a Napoleonic era backdrop. The original German title Bergblut ('Mountain Blood') is a good indication of the type of 'blood & soil' movie it really is. My copy is in German with English subtitles, and those of you who thought they knew German, but only understand about half of what is being said in this movie, relax, it takes even a native Austrian (who hasn't heard Tyrolean in about 20 years or so) a while to get used to the mountain patois used liberally by most of the actors. One minor gripe I might have is that Inga Birkenfeld, who plays Katarina, doesn't sound Bavarian, she seems to hail from north of the so-called 'Weißwurstequator'. Neither does her mother, but she doesn't get to say much. Her father, the parish priest and the Bavarian officer sound genuine, and the French sounds real, too. The Tyrolean certainly does......