| Opening Film | Diagonale 2025 |

HOW TO BE NORMAL AND THE ODDNESS OF THE OTHER WORLD
BY FLORIAN POCHLATKO (AT 2025, 102 min)

Diagonale is pleased to announce that the Festival of Austrian Film will open with the Austrian premier of Florian Pochlatko’s feature debut How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World in the presence of the filmmaker along with members of the cast and crew!

How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World © Golden Girls Film / Filmladen

„The old world is dying; the new world struggles to be born – now is the time of monsters.“

This quote by the writer and Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci appears at the beginning of How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World. The film’s heroine, Pia, is in her mid-20s. She has just been released from a psychiatric hospital and is struggling with a number of problems: the world is a complete catastrophe and Pia’s head is in a similar state. Thrown back out into “normal” life, she has to navigate between her parents, her ex-boyfriend, and other demons. Rivers are overflowing their banks, forests are on fire, and meanwhile we continue to stick our forks into our pasta, drink red wine, and pretend that everything is fine. In a world where, when seen rationally, everything is already too much, everyone is living in their own reality, or so it seems. And Pia lives in many …

A spectacular debut with an outstanding Luisa-Céline Gaffron as Pia. It’s a film like a huge wishing machine, an infernal comedy and a gateway to our present, a time full of monsters.

At the end, there is another quote inspired by the great David Lynch, a ray of light on the horizon: Please put on your sunglasses, because the future will be bright!

A wild ride with simply stunning and untamed energy

“Sometimes there are debut films whose unbridled nature is simply stunning, and leave a lasting impression. For us, How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World by Florian Pochlatko is the film of the hour. It tells the story of Pia (Luisa-Céline Gaffron), a woman in her mid-twenties who cannot cope with the demands of life – job, relationship, parents and other imponderabilia. Having just been released from a psychiatric hospital, she tries to get back on her feet but still falls back into old patterns. However, the film doesn’t paint a picture of a depressed person: Pia’s condition serves as the starting point for a wild and associative ride through states of uncertainty, euphoria, and anxiety. Her inability to find a balance appears as a reaction to a world thrown off the tracks of predictability, in which people are searching for security and even meaning.
Pochlatko tells the story as if he were racing along a Moebius strip. The cracks in the structure are also reflected in bold stylistic decisions: the film playfully makes use of various genres and narrative forms in order to appropriate them for its fragmented, but nonetheless magnificent, world design.
Florian Pochlatko is a director whose pop-cultural sensitivity and love of storytelling impress us. Among other reasons, this is because both are not an end in themselves, but a means of facing the challenges of a reality that is no longer easy to reduce to a common denominator. In our view, our opening the Diagonale with an artistic debut is a sign of the aesthetic and socially critical power of a new generation of filmmakers who will be a notable presence at this festival. How to Be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World will celebrate its world premiere in February at the Berlinale in the newly created Perspectives section. We are delighted to be able to present the Austrian premiere of this film in Graz so soon afterwards.” — Dominik Kamalzadeh & Claudia Slanar | Artistic Directors