sound/music: Dirk Schaefer

"The films of Matthias Müller employ intricate image and sound montages that combine appropriated material from Hollywood films and his own photography, to create richly associative psycho-sexual webs of meaning. The culmination is ALPSEE, a full-blown psycho-drama with elaborate mise en scène."
- Gavin Smith, Film Comment, New York, 2000

"With the glowing colours in ALPSEE, Müller leaves the gloom that prevailed in the universe of his earlier films. His clinical sharpness, however, does not deprive the film of its secret, its disquieting strangeness - and thus recalls Buñuel and Hitchcock."
- Jacques Kermabon, Bref, Paris, 1995

"Despite the seemingly innocuous gestures of household life, a dark, unmanageable world seems to want to erupt from it. At one point it literally does: in a stunning image, the milk the mother pours for her son overflows the glass onto the table, the floor, and eventually down the hall in an endless stream. This uncontrolled secretion, pure white, is disturbingly connected to the enigmatic maternal body. The sparse decor of the home, the primary color scheme, and high key lighting all emphasize the preternatural clarity of the image in ALPSEE. As in allegory, the sharp definition of the image belies its opaque, brooding signification. The pristine look of this film thus gives rise to its confusing, nightmarish quality, borne out of its name: the German word for nightmare is Alptraum."
- Alice A. Kuzniar: The Queer German Cinema. Stanford, California, 2000

"Along with the world's great cineasts - from Meliès to Chris Marker - Müller shares the desire to vanish. The filmmaker remains invisible, his location unfixed. He makes biographical cinema, but uses found material, material by others. Thus, ALPSEE, a film about Müller's childhood in the 1960s, takes you directly to Mars."
- Fritz Göttler, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, 2001

Awards: Great Prize, Festival Internacional de Curtas-Metragens de Vila do Conde, 1995; Main Award and Youth Film Award, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 1995; Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival 1996; distinction "recommended", German Commission of Valuation, 1995; Mención Especial del Jurado, Festival Internacional de Cine de Gijón, 1995; Quality Mention, Corto Imola Festival, 1995; Mention Spéciale, Festival International du Court-Métrage de Montréal, 1996; Director's Choice Award, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Jersey City, 1996