Venice Horizons Title 'Eklipse' Turns a Director's Father's AIDS Death Into a Story of Silence and Friendship
A first-time feature director is bringing a deeply personal story about AIDS, secrecy, and childhood friendship to the Venice Film Festival. Manuel Wetscher's Eklipse — the title uses a 'k' in both its German and English versions, meaning 'eclipse' — world premieres on September 5, 2026, in the Horizons section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, a competitive sidebar that runs alongside the main competition (The Hollywood Reporter).
The film is set in the 1990s at an alpine dairy farm in Austria. Two teenagers, Tomy and his best friend Chris, spend a summer helping Tomy's uncle. Tomy's father is in hospital with what the era calls 'the gay disease' — AIDS — and Tomy's mother decides to keep the real reason from her son. When Chris learns the truth, he recoils. Tomy is left facing rejection and the silence of the people around him (The Hollywood Reporter).
The story draws directly from Wetscher's own life. His father died of AIDS in 1993 at the age of 40, from Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer caused by the virus. Details of the death were kept from Wetscher as a child — the silence that Eklipse dramatises (The Hollywood Reporter).
In a director's statement, Wetscher described the film as being about the taboos surrounding AIDS, the fear of social exclusion, and how prejudice and ignorance corrode a friendship between two boys (The Hollywood Reporter).
Moritz Hohlrieder plays Tomy and Finley Brown plays Chris. Hannes Perkmann appears as Tomy's uncle, with Lenz Moretti, Lisa Schützenberger, and Barbara Romaner in supporting roles. Wetscher co-wrote the screenplay with Bernhard Jarosch, his collaborator on several earlier short films. Simone Hart handled cinematography and Anna Kirst edited the film, which runs 91 minutes in German (The Hollywood Reporter; La Biennale di Venezia).
Wetscher's path to this debut runs through a string of festival shorts: Four Seasons (2018), At Night When Mice Scream (2021), Magma (2022), and the experimental documentary short Richard (2024) (The Hollywood Reporter).
On the industry side, Eklipse is an Austria–Italy co-production from Eutopiafilm, based in Innsbruck, and Albolina Film. Films Boutique, a Berlin-based sales agency, acquired international sales rights after the Venice selection was announced — meaning the company is now handling deals to sell the film's distribution rights to buyers in territories worldwide (Screen Daily).
What makes the film stand out in the Horizons lineup is the collision between its intimate scale — two boys on a mountain farm — and the weight of what it is really about: a family swallowing a diagnosis to protect a child, and the cost of that silence once the outside world learns the truth.
