“You know, when I was a boy, I fell in love with the Virgin Mary.”

In the small Bavarian town of Altötting, a mother takes her young son to visit a nearby chapel. The boy becomes entranced by the Shrine of the Virgin Mary inside the chapel and begins daily pilgrimages to see his beloved Madonna. His love, devotion, and passion for her continue to grow, until one day his world is crushed by the devastating secret behind her eternal beauty. Mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply personal, Altötting is a coming-of-age story about love, faith, mortality, and shattered illusions.

In this poignant and philosophical animated short, acclaimed filmmaker Andreas Hykade (We Lived in Grass, Ring of Fire, The Runt, Love and Theft) interweaves scenes of quiet, spacious minimalism with flourishes of opulent beauty to create a timeless story of lost innocence.

Featuring inspired design by award-winning Portuguese animator/artist Regina Pessoa (Tragic Story with a Happy Ending, Kali the Little Vampire, Uncle Thomas), along with a spellbinding adaptation of Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria by tenor Bernard Richter, Altötting is a co-production between Studio Film Bilder, the National Film Board of Canada and Ciclope Filmes.

“You know, when I was a boy, I fell in love with the Virgin Mary.”

In the small Bavarian town of Altötting, a mother takes her young son to visit a nearby chapel. The boy becomes entranced by the Shrine of the Virgin Mary inside the chapel and begins daily pilgrimages to see his beloved Madonna. His love, devotion, and passion for her continue to grow, until one day his world is crushed by the devastating secret behind her eternal beauty. Mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply personal, Altötting is a coming-of-age story about love, faith, mortality, and shattered illusions.

In this poignant and philosophical animated short, acclaimed filmmaker Andreas Hykade (We Lived in Grass, Ring of Fire, The Runt, Love and Theft) interweaves scenes of quiet, spacious minimalism with flourishes of opulent beauty to create a timeless story of lost innocence.

Two-liner

“You know, when I was a boy, I fell in love with the Virgin Mary. It happened in a little Bavarian town called Altötting.” Mesmerizing, haunting, and deeply personal, Altötting is a coming-of-age story about love, faith, mortality, and shattered illusions.

One-liner     

“You know, when I was a boy, I fell in love with the Virgin Mary. It happened in a little Bavarian town called Altötting.”

Throughout Andreas Hykade’s career, his films have skirted between two strands: a minimalist, almost stick-figure-like style (The Runt, Nuggets, Tom) and a more elaborate and visually explosive design (Love and Theft, Walkampf, Ring of Fire, We Lived in Grass).

Hykade’s most recent film, Altötting, bridges both of those approaches, combining an elegant, minimalist design and sound approach that emphasizes space and silence with moments of dazzlingly detailed opulence (notably in the scene where the Virgin Mary reveals her secret to the man).

In creating these more elaborate scenes, Hykade reached out to Portuguese animator Regina Pessoa, who’s known for her distinctive engraving (or scratch) technique. Hykade first encountered Pessoa’s work in 2000, when his “scratchy” black-and-white film Ring of Fire was touring the festival circuit at the same time as her debut film, The Night. “Festivals often scheduled the two films together,” says Hykade. “So I realized that Regina was the queen of scratch. I retired from scratching to concentrate on simple stick figures. Then, 15 years later, I envisioned Altötting as a kind of prequel to Ring of Fire. So I needed that scratchy thing again, which left me with two possibilities: ripping off Regina and doing a poor man’s version of her technique, or convincing Regina to do the job.”

Fortunately for Hykade, Pessoa agreed to come on board. “I will be forever grateful,” says Hykade. “I needed Regina’s contribution so that she could put her holy scratches on top of the animation. So the result is not stilted scratching but something quite magical and alive, which is exactly what was needed for the film, I think.”

Beyond your pilgrimages to visit the Shrine of the Virgin Mary, were you actively involved in the church as a youth? 

Yes. I was an altar boy in the little village near Altötting. When I was 12 years old, Pope John II visited Altötting (the first pope to visit Germany in 500 years). The whole town was turned upside down, because television reporters came to record the event. To make sure they would have a nice, symmetrical image for TV screens, they searched for an altar boy of a certain size, which was exactly my size at the time. So they picked me. The pope touched my head, but it had no effect on me.

Did you revisit the Chapel of Grace in Altötting when you started this project? What was the experience like returning there (or to other churches) after many years? 

Well, I still go there, probably three times a year, to watch the people and see how the paintings on the wall have changed. For example, there used to be paintings of soldiers with swastikas asking the Virgin Mary for help. They got rid of these paintings and replaced them with awfully painted stuff by students.

Silence and empty space play a big role in Altötting—as they have in some of your more minimalist works (e.g. Nuggets, Tom). In a way, that beautifully captures the power of being inside a church, where it’s that vastness and deep silence that is so overwhelming.  

For me, silence is the key to everything. And I’m not only talking about aural silence, I’m talking about visual silence as well: nothing moves. This can create suspense before the action—it can also provide a space for reflection. Besides that, every piece of work seems to have its own natural rhythm. Why is it so important to me? Because I think it is an essential part of filmmaking. 

Your early films, We Lived in Grass and Ring of Fire, were big and long and detailed… but later works like The Runt, the Tom series and Nuggets are more restrained. Was there a conscious decision to make ‘smaller’ works that still contained a lot of power and had the impact of the ‘bigger’ films?

I don’t think in terms of big and small. For me, the more intense the better. It’s like pressing a chunk of coal in the hope that it becomes a diamond. One important aspect of Altötting is that it links all the other films together, so it’s quite natural that it combines elements of all the other stuff.

Altötting has a strong connection to your previous films, notably We Lived in Grass, Ring of Fire and The Runt, which are also coming-of-age stories that find the protagonists learning some tough and painful lessons about life. Was your childhood a happy one or filled with disappointments?

It was filled with disappointments. I could not fit in, although I tried hard with football, handball, boxing, swimming, and so on. Nothing worked. And I grew up in a basement—no window. No natural light. So that was kind of grim and isolating. Art became a way out of all that. But “Only Happy When It Rains” is still one of my favourite songs.

You reference your mother in both the film and the end credits. In a way, Altötting seems like a bit of a eulogy for your Mom. When the man hugs the Virgin Mary, it is quite moving, and I kept thinking of a son bidding farewell to his mother.  

Well, first of all, it’s a farewell to illusion. This includes a loss of safeness. The goodbye scene symbolizes the human being emancipated from religion and left in a cold place. In a second layer of meaning, the loss of your goddess refers to the loss of a mother. While we were making the film, my mother passed away (the Ave Maria was played at her funeral), so there is this personal layer as well.

Have you reconciled the beauty of the Virgin Mary with the horrific realities of both religion and existence? Once faith is gone, what’s left?

What’s left is the belief that we should transform the power and the beauty of religion into a secular world. Like composing a song that goes “Blackbird singing in the dead of night,” or like making some of these animated films.