The Hand Of Fortune (2007)

"In the card game of our life we have to play with the cards we´ve got. You may lose some, win some - it's all the same, but there's a fistful of cards for everyone. Welcome to the smoky shadows of a hidden bar room, the card sharks are waiting for you..."

This movie is the first part of a film trilogy project called "The Case Of Fortune". The pre-production phase of The Hand was unbelievably fast. Once the basic idea was born, it was almost instantly distilled from our twisted cinematic minds into some kind of form for the script. The more detailed script was hammered down on a very old laptop practically on one night before the actual shooting took place.
Some parts of the script were actually made at the same time as some of our crew were already setting up the lights (mainly on their cigarettes, but some movie lights were set up, too).

We had the whole thing filmed during just one day on November 2006. After that day we started our hard, time-consuming, challenging and rewarding post-production process, which lasted for many, many months. And after that, some months more. Everything you hear on the soundtrack, (music included) was recorded afterwards in our "studio" (which was the very same room we dressed up as the bar).
We had considerably tight budget on this, just below 100 Euros.

We had the original version of this film (lasting 14 minutes and 37 seconds) finished in March 2007 and screened it right after that for a small audience (mainly the cast and crew) again in the same room we made the film. We send it to the Cannes and some other festivals with high hopes, but got rejected. At that time we already had some plans for our next film and also got our first ideas of a whole film trilogy.

So, we started to produce our second film of the trilogy: The Band Of Fortune (you can watch it in imdb, too) had its somewhat limited premiere screening for selected guests on 1.11.2008. Soon after that we decided to cut a shortened edition of The Hand Of Fortune. Original version seemed too slow and repetitive to us, so we just cut over 3 minutes off it. The resulting final edition is 11 minutes and 22 seconds long and it really got better that way!

You could watch and rate The Hand Of Fortune on Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB)

Or maybe you prefer to watch it in slightly better quality on Vimeo.

High quality XVid video in original PAL resolution for you to download (about 110 Megs): XViD video