Pensao Globo
sound/music: Dirk Schaefer

"Eight years after his elegiac THE MEMO BOOK, Müller revisits Lisbon, the city of fate, of longing and decay and divisible selves. Shadowing his protagonist from a hotel cell into labyrinthine streets, the film contemplates dissolution and the permeable boundaries between life and death in sanguinary colors and swimming superimpositions."
- New York Film Festival, 1997

"The film presents one visually dominant theme, the constant superimpositions, or double exposure effect, of what is being shown. The man seems to be accompanying himself as a ghost, the world escapes him continually, things are no longer fixed in their proper places; nothing remains still. The shots of the man in the hotel are taken from two slightly different positions but from the same distance, the lighting is intensified and is slightly distorted in time and space. (...) There have been too many attempts to transform poetry into film in the history of cinema. PENSAO GLOBO, however, represents something else. Müller does not limit himself to an attempt to translate an existing verbal structure into images. His success lies in being able to repeat in cinema the same structural act that is the basis of poetry."
- Peter Tscherkassky, "Ein Dichter der Bilder", Pesaro, 2000

"Just as in reality - when our thoughts constantly run ahead or behind of everything we do - the space behind the visible seems to appear here. A man lies down upon a bed, a hand reaches for the nightstand; everything is overshadowed by the same action, and you can't tell the difference between shadow, premonition and echo."
- Michael Althen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2002

Awards: Best German Short Film of 1997, Preis der Deutschen Filmkritik; distinction "highy recommended", German Commission of Valuation, 1997; Prize of the Interfilm-Jury, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 1997; Mention Spéciale, Festival internazionale del film Locarno, 1997; Prix de la Presse, Festival du Court-Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand, 1997; Certificate of Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1998; First Prize, Semana de cine experimental, Madrid 1998; Best of the New Screen, Images Festival, Toronto 1998