71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls)
Poster
Directed by	Michael Haneke
Written by	Michael Haneke
Produced by	Veit Heiduschka
Starring	Gabriel Cosmin Urdes Lukas Miko Otto Grünmandl Anne Bennent Udo Samel
Cinematography	Christian Berger
Edited by	Marie Homolkova
Release date	1994 (1994)
Running time	96 minutes
Countries	Austria Germany
Languages	German Romanian

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (German: 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls) is a 1994 Austrian drama film directed by Michael Haneke. It has a fragmented storyline as the title suggests, and chronicles several unrelated stories in parallel. Separate narrative lines intersect in an incident at the last of the film: a mass killing at an Austrian bank. The film is set in Vienna, October to December 1993. Haneke refers to 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance as the last part of his "glaciation trilogy", whose other parts are his preceding two films.

Cast

• Gabriel Cosmin Urdes as Marian Radu (Romanian Boy)
• Lukas Miko as Max
• Otto Grünmandl as Tomek
• Anne Bennent as Inge Brunner
• Udo Samel as Paul Brunner
• Branko Samarovski as Hans
• Claudia Martini as Maria
• Georg Friedrich as Bernie
• Alexander Pschill as Hanno
• Klaus Händl as Gerhard
• Corina Eder as Anni

Opening

The film opens with intertitles which introduces the mass killing in detail. So it chronicles in flashbacks a last few months of Vienna.

Characters

The drama consists of varied characters in each storyline: a Romanian boy who immigrated illegally into Austria and lives in streets of Vienna; a religious bank security worker; an old man staring at TV screen; a childless couple considering adoption; a frustrated student and so on.

Film division

The film is divided into a number of variable-length "fragments" divided by black pauses, and apparently unrelated to each other. The film is characterised by quite a lot of fragments that take form of video newscasts unrelated to the main storylines. News footages of real events are shown through video monitors. Newscasts report on Bosnian War, Somali Civil War, South Lebanon conflict, Kurdish–Turkish conflict, and molestation allegations against Michael Jackson.

External links

• 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls at IMDb
• 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
  (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls) at AllMovie