My Talk with Florence

As a young woman, Florence Burnier-Bauer was drawn to the art of a rebel named Otto Muhl (1925-2013) and joined a cult of followers who admired Muhl’s paintings of violent scenes and rejected marriage and private property. Muhl would eventually be imprisoned for abusing children of the members of that cult. Florence, whose children were taken away from her, tells of the horror of years with Muhl in a head-on feature-length talk with Paul Poet. The camera does not move. There’s barely any archival imagery in this work of minimalism. Yet Florence relives those years with an extraordinary drama - abused as a child in a French bourgeois family, a life of crime as a runaway, a refuge from vagabondage on the road in Friedrichshof, an Austrian counterculture commune led by Muhl, a proponent of Viennese Actionism. Welcome to the dark side of free love.
A self-taught filmmaker, Paul Poet is the director and producer of the documentaries My Talk with Florence, Empire Me: New Worlds Are Happening (2011), and Foreigners Out: Schlingensief’s Container (2002). He is now at work on a feature adaptation of the 1970’s cult novel. The Minus Man.
Filmography: Empire Me (2011), Foreigners Out! (2002).