Elisabeth Uhl

Ask how the Korean focus of this company began, and you will not hear about a market analysis. You will hear about a woman whose name half of Korea knows and whose origin almost nobody does.

Do you actually understand Korea?

Korea’s first First Lady was a girl from Inzersdorf, on the edge of Vienna. Franziska Donner, married to Syngman Rhee. In Korea the name is known — where she came from much less so, and she is often taken for Australian or American. In Austria almost nobody knows her at all.

When Elisabeth Uhl found that out, she went looking. She found Soonae Lee-Fink, who had written a book about Franziska Donner-Rhee in the nineties. From that point it became serious. An invitation to the film festival in Busan followed. A story nobody knows, and two countries it belongs to — that became HANNI, an equal co-production with Seoul.

That she looked at all, though, had a history.

It started with a love story. A cousin fell head over heels for a Korean pianist in Vienna. That was thirty years ago. From 2010 came the enthusiasm of the eldest of three children: Korean series and music, years before anyone here knew PSY. Most parents let that pass. She sat down and watched too. When a child laughs out loud at a series, you eventually look for yourself.

The first thing she noticed was formal: Korean films breathe differently. A pause is allowed to stand. A scene is allowed to last. A feeling is not cut away but held. That she noticed it early comes from martial arts — anyone who trains watches the breath, the tension and its release, the moment before the movement. In Korean storytelling that moment is not the preparation. It is the scene.

And then you ask questions. The same ones as with any historical subject: what actually happened. What is the background. What is being shown — and what is meant by it. With a Korean subject one layer is added. Why is something seen this way. Why felt this way. Where are the points of friction. And that heightening they tell a story with: where does it come from, and why does it hold. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is not a claim to knowledge. It is an attempt not to offend anyone through ignorance.

Squid Game shows it most clearly. Before it, Korea was a modest subject in Austria; after it, suddenly everywhere. And the Western verdict came quickly: overdone, garish, fantasy. Look closer and you find something else. The debts the characters are trapped in are not invented. The strike in the main character’s backstory happened. What looks like heightening from here is a good deal of reality over there — one we do not know. Or do not know any more.

Why does this material travel? Jane Austen. Korean series, reduced to their essence, tell Austen’s stories: the same longing for love, for belonging, for being seen. Told with the same seriousness and without a wink. You may disagree — she will enjoy the argument.

None of which is understanding it the way someone does who grew up there. She is European and will stay European. She tries to understand — that is the more honest answer.

Can we trust you?

Trust cannot be asserted and cannot be presented. Only someone in the room can create it — someone who understands what was meant, not only what was said. That is why RitzlFilm works with G300 Entertainment in Seoul as an equal partner and not as a supplier. And why she does not pretend to be Korean herself.

What divides Austria and Germany is the language they share. Two neighbours, the same words, and still a room full of misunderstandings. If there is that much room between neighbours — how much lies between Vienna and Seoul?

That distance cannot be organised away. Anyone who promises you otherwise has never worked across it. All you can do is make sure somebody notices it while it is happening — in the meeting, not in the post-mortem.

And mistakes happen anyway. Knowing the rules does not stop you from stepping wrong. No set of rules covers the whole of reality, and nobody looks things up in the middle of a conversation. The difference is not whether it happens. It is whether it is noticed, whether you apologise — and whether it happens a second time.

What she does

Producer on The Last Days of Mankind, head of production on The Best of All Worlds. Film funding, project financing, distribution and exploitation — and the whole marketing side, the part that decides whether anyone finds the thing you spent four years making. She came to film from online marketing and never let go of it.

As co-writer she writes with Wolfgang Ritzberger: HANNI, Kill Mozart, Alicia.

She grew up in a family business. At home there was a printing works with a hundred employees — machines, deadlines, wages, and customers who need their material on Friday and not on Monday. Grow up like that and you take a shooting schedule to be something you keep, and you pick things up when they are left lying.

When a driver drops out on set, she drives the truck. Up to 3.5 tonnes — an ordinary licence covers that.

And, because it interested her: a qualification as a mental trainer. Two thirds of a shoot is working with people under pressure — tired, out of their depth, in the wrong country, with too little time. Taking that seriously gets you further than a better schedule.

A numbers person as well: seventeen years of product management and quality auditing in a corporate group, then COO in a software start-up. A co-production across two continents rarely fails on creative grounds — it fails on versions that drift apart, and on a schedule that exists in three incompatible files.

Get in touch

Write to her about a project, a co-production, or the Korean question: office@ritzlfilm.at. She answers herself, in English or German, within two working days.

Two things up front, because they usually come first. HANNI is in financing; the film has not been shot yet. And if this is about shooting in Austria rather than a co-production, everything practical is on the Production Services page — the rebate, the thresholds, the locations, and when Austria is the wrong choice.