Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl

The basic script, although many scenes were improvised, was written by Johannes Grenzfurthner and Roland Gratzer in a couple of days in November 2013, based on their theatre performance Campaign (Volkstheater, 2006). Some of the ideas were brainstormed at a coffee shop[3] in Vienna with the entire production crew. The film contains dialogues in English, German, a variety of slangs, dialects, accents, and fictitious languages. Subtitles are an integral part of the story.[4]

The film was commissioned by Austrian broadcasting station ORF III as part of the series "Artist-in-Residence" for a budget of approximately 5000 EUR. It can therefore be considered microfilmmaking or guerrilla filmmaking.
monochrom also used an embedded prank to raise money. The movie contains a text insert similar to watermarks used in festival viewing copies. The text insert asks the viewer to report the film as copyright infringement by calling a premium-rate phone number (1.09 EUR/minute). The film aired on Austrian national television in March 2014. Grenzfurthner co-financed the film with proceeds from the premium-rate number. According to Telepolis he calls this new strategy 'crowdratting.'[5]

monochrom member Franz Ablinger holding the shadow puppet of Echsenfriedl ("Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl", 2014)

Principal photography commenced on December 2, 2013 and ended January 19, 2014, but only a total of 5 days of principal photography. That left around 5 weeks for post-production and editing.[6]

Due to the fast production process and the financial limitations, no film score was composed for "Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl". Grenzfurthner instead uses an assortment of 8bit, synth pop and electronica tracks. Grenzfurthner chose songs with a specific retro quality because "they may sound old-school to us, but not in the world of the Gstettensaga, where all retro electronic music is still impossible and futuristic."[7]
The film features music by Symbion Project (Kasson Crooker), Max Beseda, Yakov, Robot City, Robert Glashüttner, Christoph Burstup Weiss, Krach der Roboter, BLEO and Starpause, Stefan Franke, Leigh Howells.

Amy R. Handler of Film Threat gave the film 5 (of 5) stars: "Grenzfurthner's outspoken, swiftly flying little flick is the must-see indie of 2014, as far as I'm concerned. Everyone, be they intellectuals, political-types, or simply those that love great blackly comic, sensual horror, will fall madly in love with 'Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl'. See it, as soon as possible, and I promise you'll never be bored at the movies again."[14] Net culture magazine Furtherfield calls it a "hackploitation art house film" that reimagines "the makerspace as grindhouse", a "retro-futuristic post-cyberpunk adventure in the tradition of cinema grotesque". Gstettensaga's "fascinating cinematic pastiche is more than just a firework of rhizomatic intertextuality, a symptom of the depthlessness of postmodern aesthetics or excessive enthusiasm for experimentation in the field of form. In their infamous 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have identified the technique of bricolage as the characteristic mode of production under 'schizophrenic' capitalism, a facet triumphantly magnified by the filmmakers."[15] Hacker magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly interprets the film as a call to class consciousness for hackers: "Setting the film in the future forces hackers to confront a choice: Will we let ourselves and our ingenuity be recuperated by all-consuming market forces? Or will we come together - as is our potential - as the class that ends capitalism's conquest to secure all means of production?"[16] Pop culture theorist Stefan Tiron comments that he is "overenthusiastic about Gstettensaga - because it distracts the Hollywood canon, because it is such a genre bender, a satiric H bomb, a horror movie and ex-auction house vaudeville going for the unexpected dialectical turns of current history, and leading us into the untrodden and definitely outrageous wastelands that could be populated by the likes of Surf Nazis Must Die, Escape from New York, Steel Dawn or America 3000."[17] Jason Scott Sadofsky calls it "the best kind of low-budget filmmaking", it is like "watching an absurdist play by Beckett, if Beckett decided to work on the Mad Max franchise."[18] V. Vale was "struck by the beautiful imagery and sound, mythological plot dimensions"[19] and Richard Kadrey calls it a "mad post-collapse satire of information culture and tech fetishism, in a weird sort of melding of Stalker, Network, and The Bed-Sitting Room."[20] Political scholar Sebastian Vetter interprets the satirical dimension of the plot: "The old world has been reduced to ashes by the earlier beacons of hope (China stands for Maoism and Google for alternative culture). All that remains are stretches of land governed by idiocy and dialects. As Marxists, the people from Monochrom know that only the revolution can free us from capitalism. And yet the revolution is no more alive than unicorns are."[21] Film critic Bonni Rambatan says that the film "forces us to think deeper about the fact that much of today's romanticized revolutions often go eerily hand in hand with the development of digital capitalism. Few films today, if any, manage to do such a feat."[22] German online magazine Telepolis praised the eclectic, multi-layered humor.[5]
The film has a fan following in the hacker and tech community.[23][24][25][26][27][28]

The film won Best Foreign Horror Feature at the 2014 Indie Gathering International Film Festival,[29] won Best Hacker Feature at the 2014 PhutureCon Festival,[30] won Best Foreign Cult Movie at the 2014 Fright Night Film Fest[31] and won Best Narrative Feature at the Maker Film Festival.[32] It was nominated for Best Feature at Colortape International Film Festival[33] and Best Foreign Language Feature Film, Best Director of a Foreign Language Film and Best Soundtrack at the 2015 International Filmmaker Festival of World Cinema (London).[34] Microfilmmaker Magazine awarded the movie an Award of Superiority (9.5/10).[35] The Indie Fest awarded the movie an Award of Merit.[36] The 2015 'DIY Film Festival' in Los Angeles awarded the film a 'honorable mention'.[37]