Peter Turrini, Austrian playwright, born 1944 in St. Margarethen/Lavanttal, grew up in Maria Saal, Carinthia. Since 1971 a freelance writer, he lives in Kleinriedenthal near Retz. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages and his plays are performed worldwide.

Return to My Point of Origin

The titular "point of origin" of this documentary film about and with Peter Turrini is the Tonhof in Maria Saal. Here, in the 1950s and 60s, the artist couple Maja and Gerhard Lampersberg kept an open house for "completely unknown art lunatics", as Turrini calls them at one point in the film — from Thomas Bernhard to Christine Lavant and many others. For the 15-year-old Peter Turrini, the Tonhof was a magical place, his "first home — laboratory, enclave, cradle of Austrian post-war literature". The late director and Klagenfurt Stadttheater artistic director Dietmar Pflegerl commissioned the playwright to write a piece about this era. The actress and filmmaker Ruth Rieser played Claire at the world premiere of "Bei Einbruch der Dunkelheit" in 2006. In her visually powerful and contemplative documentary, she now gives the Carinthian playwright a voice — reflective, open-hearted, affectionate. Without resentment or voyeurism, the conversations gently trace the heartbeat of the Tonhof and its now-deceased owners. In doing so, Peter Turrini — today 82 years old — also reveals himself as an attentive friend of the young, a man with a fine sensitivity for the present. Alongside images of the place and the farmstead, atmospheric readings in the Tonhof barn and in the nearly unchanged rooms of the house condense this documentary into an exceptionally personal portrait of Peter Turrini.