The Eremites 2016

The film follows Albert [Andreas Lust], a man in his mid-30s, and his mother Marianne [Ingrid Burkhard], a mountain farmer who has long steered their lives. Albert is the sole surviving child of Marianne and Rudl [Peter Mitterrutzner], whose three siblings died years earlier in an avalanche on the way to school. Marianne’s protective love keeps him tethered to the Eggerhof farm, and she arranges for him to take a job in a marble quarry down in the valley. Albert, introverted and wary of crowds, struggles to fit in among the quarry’s workers, occasionally slipping back to the hay store at the edge of the yard to sleep.

One day, Rudl dies in a fatal accident at work. Marianne hides this fact from Albert, fearing that he might return to the farm to take over his father’s duties, and she buries Rudl’s body on the mountain. But as her strength wanes, she finally confesses that his father died in an accident and asks Albert for help.

Meanwhile, Albert has already settled in the valley and has begun a life with Paola [Orsi Tóth], a Hungarian guest worker and canteen cook at the marble quarry, with whom a quiet love story is unfolding. The new relationship complicates the morally fraught situation, because Paola tells him that she must return to Hungary. Albert is given three days’ leave to organize his life, a deadline that presses him to decide what the future will hold for him, his mother, and the farm.

The quarry itself forms a stark backdrop—an industrial world full of routine and pressure, where workers like Brucharbeiter 5 [Anton Algrang], Quarry Worker Paul [Johann Nikolussi], and Gruber [Hannes Perkmann] move through their days under the watchful eye of Dr. Koch [Hans Peter Hallwachs], the quarry’s CEO. This environment heightens the sense of isolation and the tug between duty and desire that runs through Albert’s choices.

In a story that blends family obligation with personal longing, the film explores how one man negotiates a future that may pull him away from the land his mother fights to preserve, a future that could leave him emotionally torn and caught between two worlds.