Empress and the Forest, The

A palace in a private woodland park near the city of Vienna; 25 square miles of lonely beauty designed for a tragic empress. The Lainzer Park was a gift from the Emperor to his wife Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, more than a century ago. It was to be her sanctuary from the suffocating protocol of court. Today, visitors are restricted to the official paths of a walled wonderland that is both completely wild and fully protected, a landscape untouched by the age of industry. In the midst of the forest is a garden whose four-hundred-year old oaks have trunks with diameters greater than four metres. The crowns of the trees are host to more than 1,000 insect species, including a hundred different kinds of butterfly. In the spirit of Thomas Rilk's last film «Wasteland Warriors», set in Vienna's building sites and scrublands, this hidden ecosystem reveals a macro world of astonishing variety, beauty and colour in the trees and on the ground, and follows the free-roaming deer and wild hogs that live so close to the busy centre of Austria's capital city. (official distributor synopsis)