Matthias von Braun is an award-winning dark surrealist filmmaker. His short films have been screened at renowned art galleries, and film festivals around the world.
Von Braun leads ‘Filmmaking for Artists’ workshops at the prestigious BFI Southbank in London. https://www.matthiasvonbraun.com/workshops/
Von Braun’s Machine won the Best Art Film award at Hollywood HorrorFest in Hollywood California on November 5 2023. http://www.hollywoodhorrorfest.com
Von Braun’s Impenetrable premiered at Fright Nights – the ultimate Festival of Fear- in Pasching Austria on October 21 2023. https://frightnights.eu
Von Braun’s Impenetrable has been selected as the opening film of Secs Fest in Seattle Washington on November 10 2023. https://www.secsfest.org
Von Braun’s Machine has been nominated for three international film festival awards including Best Experimental and The Nicholas Vince Award for Best Horror at the South African Independent Film Festival.
LFTV on the set of von Braun’s Machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrRCHDJ8iis
Von Braun’s Devoid has been nominated for twenty-three international film festival awards and won six awards in different categories at festivals in London, Berlin, Madrid, and Los Angeles.
Devoid ★★★★★
By Adrian Perez
Devoid of many things is Monika Blaszczak’s protagonist here in Matthias Von Braun’s 2021 masterpiece; Blaszczak performs an arresting rendition of a human physical vessel lacking and awaiting to get wired with its consciousness. Just as Neo got unplugged from The Matrix (1999) and spitted out into the machine world’s drainage system, Blaszczak eloquently emerges out of a similar post-apocalyptic oil orifice into existence for the first time, making of her first movements a ballet-like choreography that soon gets glitched up by mechanical movements that override and corrupt her hardware system.
Von Braun proves he lives and breathes Film. Every departmental aspect of this production feels the touch of a loyal servant of Film, who not only cares for the details and puts forth an immaculate micro-short film that showcases the highest degree of cinematographic achievement, but also impregnates a subtextual and intertextual richness that will satisfy more than one science fiction fan.
If you’re the hardcore Matrix fan as I am, you’ll automatically induct Von Braun’s Devoid as an unofficial addition to the Wachowskis’ Animatrix (2003) anthology of short films that expand the world of the Matrix. Devoid’s environmental surrounding resembles a familiarity to the Matrix’s machine world, Blaszczak mimics Ridley Scott’s Titans in Prometheus (2012), and its acoustic realm pulsates an impending doom that echoes Blade Runner’s (1982) mythological and electronic Neo-noir score. Von Braun’s Devoid is both parts stylish and philosophical with every fibre of its being. This is a micro-short film about creation, or better yet, miscreation; when Blaszczak eventually retreats into the oil tank she emerges from, Von Braun suggests an existential crisis, an incompatibility, a virus attack, a corruption, toxic contamination with this uncanny mechanical world. Von Braun’s ambiguous oeuvre engulfs us into a toxic world that corrupts us to the point that his inhumane heroine would rather be replugged to the Matrix and go to sleep. Von Braun’s latest audiovisual canvas elicits a philosophical dimension that science fiction has the power to evoke. After watching Matthias Von Braun’s micro-short film Devoid you’ll be grateful you weren’t born in this dark post-apocalyptic world of his making. A harsh thesis puts forth the impotence we can come to feel if we’re not born into an untroubled utopia, then what psycho-emotional and psychosomatic repercussions can that have on us?
Original, intertextual, phantasmagorical, Devoid is an absolute masterpiece; whoever says otherwise is fooling themselves. Von Braun is an original who displays an ambitious cinematographic calibre and an auteurist maturity that takes a lifetime of film education and auto-didacticism to gain. Chapó Von Braun!