The Austria country focus of the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival showcases mostly fiction features and comes after a strong showing for Austrian films at the Berlinale. But Christoph Schwarz’s Piggy Bank, which gets its U.K. premiere at Glasgow on Monday, takes a very different approach, mixing mockumentary and self-experiment in a way that has become the filmmaker’s signature style throughout his shorts, videos, and other creative works.
“The director’s plan to live for ‘a year without money’ interrogates idealism and activism while offering serious observations on the climate crisis,” says a Glasgow festival synopsis of Schwarz’s first feature film. “When the Austrian director receives €90,000 ($94,000) to make a TV documentary about living for a year without money, he immediately blows all the cash on a weekend house for his family. This is just the jumping-off point for a film that cleverly mixes fact with fiction to take a sideswipe at performative activism, slyly asking what it means when you literally have money to burn.”
Schwarz enjoys discussions after film screenings. “I have the feeling that there are always many things the audience wants to discuss after the film,” he tells THR. “I think you have more questions after the movie than before.”
He sounds like he also likes stimulating debate. “You could say that, yeah,” Schwarz shares. “But I think that it’s important that we don’t forget the humor. Because if you confront people with what they are doing or what they are not doing, it creates an atmosphere of guilt. And I think it’s important that we understand that the climate (crisis) is a problem for all of us, so we have to solve it together. And laughing is a good starting point.”
So, why did the Austrian decide to live without money for a year? “This is my starting point for many projects – I come up with some kind of adventure which I am interested in,” Schwarz explains. “And I felt that this fits perfectly with a plot about climate activism because, as the protagonist says in the film, there is a big x between climate activism and money-less living. Because it’s mainly about living more efficiently with our resources and sharing things. It’s not important to own everything yourself.”
Making the film was “a really good excuse to do climate activism, and, on the other hand, climate activism was a really good plot for the film,” he concludes. “So both sides, making a film and being a climate activist, enriched each other.”
Having studied art but not having any formal film education, “I have a very universal understanding,” Schwarz tells THR. “I see myself rather as an artist. And I’m more interested in thinking about what film could be. And it’s not about just telling stories. It’s more about thinking how film could work in a new way, and work with different layers of meaning. Putting myself at the center of it is something that doesn’t end at the end of the film. My work has more of a conceptual, formative artist twist to itself.”
Schwarz likes handling the various creative duties in the film creation process, including editing. “It’s much easier if it’s only you doing all these jobs and at the same time nobody can tell where the border is between fact and fiction,” he explains. “I also feel safe somehow. I can make jokes about things, and people don’t believe them but it’s the plain truth. I have been doing these kinds of films for 15 years now, so I have gotten used to this way of working.”
The border between fact and fiction comes up again when we wrap up our chat. Is there anything else the filmmaker would like to share? “I think this is a very nice way of asking the last question,” Schwarz replies. “I would just like to reverse it. Because I’m working with truth and lies all the time, I would really love if you made something up and just see what happens. That way we could open up the authorship.”
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