30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Italian premiere

After the death of his best friend, Tonio Freuesinger, an Alpine guide and Bavarian ski instructor, meets an American millionaire and his daughter and saves the latter during a grammatic climb. The father and daughter then invite Anton to move to New York, where he will surely find work. Anton attracted by that sort of mirage, decides to leave his homeland and mountains and emigrate to United States. In New York, after much difficulty, he finds the millionaire's home, but then discovers that the owner and his daughter are away on a trip. All alone, not knowing the language and with no one to turn to, Anton wanders the street of the strange and hostile city, sleeping on a bench in Central Park, suffering from hunger and the bleakest misery and, finally, the humiliaton of the thef of a piece of bread: Anton finds work at last as an attendant in a boxing hall. Here he findsthe millionaire and his daughter who , still grateful to Anton for having saved her life, offers to marry him. But He understands that his world is another, gives in to the longign for his mountains and home, and returns to Bavaria where finds his longtime fiancée waiting for him. 

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  Luis Trenker

  Luis Trenker (1892-1990) was a South Tyrolean director, writer, and mountaineer born in Ortisei, and a Ladin native speaker. He began in cinema as an actor in the 1920s, and then became a director, protagonist, and author of his own films, which often brought stories of mountain people to the screen, especially his own mountains. He was forbidden to work in film during the Nazi period, as he refused to submit to the regime. He was awarded a prize in Venice in 1936 for Der Kaiser von Kalifornien. He achieved success with Liebesbriefe aus dem Engadin (1938).