“Here comes my story, for what it’s worth,” begins Christoph Schwarz’s debut feature film Piggy Bank, “and I’m not asking you to believe it.” It’s an apt opening line, setting the viewer up for a film that is wry and unassuming, and that playfully twists truth and fiction.
Filmmaker Schwarz has just been invited to participate in an Austrian TV documentary series called ‘Striking Years’, and they’d like him to do something climate related. The budget they are offering just happens to match the asking price of the cottage in the countryside that his wife is eyeing as a weekend retreat. So he blows the money on the second home, and then has to make the film for nothing, declaring himself on a ‘money strike’ against capitalism.
We then follow our amiable and lanky protagonist as he attempts to live a year without money, learning to scavenge wasted food from supermarket bins, bartering, donating blood in order to get the free meal that is offered afterwards. He gets some rescue chickens and grows potatoes on a roundabout. Yes, this is all fine, say the producers of the series, but it’s too easy. We were hoping for something more radical. Can he get stuck in with some protests, some Extinction Rebellion actions?
There’s plenty to choose from. Local activists in Vienna are organising against a highway project and he is able to use his filmmaking skills to support their actions. He works with Critical Mass and food waste campaigners, and comes up with attention seeking stunts of his own. To protest how cars are prioritised unfairly in public space, he fills a convertible with soil and makes it into a herb garden. The authorities repeatedly try to tow it away, even though it’s in a parking bay paid for by his sister. You can buy space for a car, but not for a garden.
We have seen these sorts of films before, from No Impact Man in 2009 to Josh Appignanesi’s similar work of auto-fiction My Extinction in 2023. Piggy Bank is more of a satirical take on those ‘man does radical thing for a year’ sort of films. It interrogates them and has a lot more fun with it, in a droll Austrian sort of way. Schwarz repeatedly undermines himself and pokes holes in his own activism. Can he really claim to be living without money when his parents are paying his rent? How can he be on strike from money when the TV company are paying him?
When a friend challenges him on this, he decides to burn the director’s fee as a symbolic gesture, but he checks with his accountant first and is delighted to discover that this would be tax deductible. It’s a typical moment in a film full of such moments, gently satirical, faintly absurd, like a Kurt Vonnegut novel set around climate activism. Schwarz keeps probing the line between protest and performance. Is he a genuine climate activist? Is he doing it for the film? Or is he ultimately doing it for himself, so that “when our planet finally melts down, at least I am less guilty than everyone else?”
From that first line onwards, the film invites the audience to ask how much of it is staged. It’s openly billed as a ‘mockumentary’ but then claims to tell the truth. Towards the end, a friend says something that Schwarz likes. If I go and get my camera, would you say that again, he asks – but we just saw it on film. Camera still rolling, Schwarz wanders out of shot to get his camera, an unreliable narrator to the end.
- Piggy Bank makes its English language debut at the Glasgow Film Festival and then features in watchAUT at the ICA in March.
The Earthbound Report 