My Fathers, My Mother and Me

The late Sixties spawned a variety of weird communes but perhaps none quite so large, bizarre and isolated as Friedrichshof in Austria. Founded by Viennese actionist Otto Muehl, its three-point mantra was ‘free sexuality’, ‘communal property’ and ‘communal childcare’, and its aim was the destruction of the nuclear family. It was all going well until, in the 1990s, the commune revolted and Muehl was arrested and jailed for sexual offences. The director of this reminiscence doc, Paul-Julien Robert, was actually born into the Friedrichshof commune. Here he looks back at his life using the evocative power of archive film.