Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

Both the King and his son have been deposed by popular demand. The now Prinz of Arkadia certainly enjoys his new role, which without much changing his lifestyle leaves him free to concentrate on his main interest -women. Including an actress who once wrote a mocking song about him -a song that he likes to sing.

The intellectual Willie flees from his bourgeois-academic environment, leaving behind his wife, child, and job to lead a vagabond life. In Vienna, he meets the retired laborer Josef, who becomes his closest friend. Together, they drink and roam the city. Willie makes one last attempt to visit his ex-wife in Salzburg, but she turns him away. Secretly, he takes his son Tommi with him, putting him in danger when they encounter a sinister motorcycle gang.

The seedy underbelly of Vienna at night. Mercedes is a femme fatale from Mexico, newly arrived at the Vienna airport with her German boyfriend Rainer, where they have smuggled a kilo of cocaine through customs. Unfortunately for them, the city has just had a major drug crackdown, leaving them without buyers and money. Disgusted with Rainer, Mercedes ditches him and hooks up with Harry, a lonely and bored cab driver who agrees to help her find a buyer for the drugs so she can get some cash and go home. She offers Harry a deal he can't refuse. Is he just another pawn for Mercedes or will her promises help him achieve his hope and dreams? The story careens through the night streets of Vienna, following two amateurs navigating their way through the treacherous world of the drug trade. It's a mood piece with the backdrop of a stifling urban loneliness.

Kristin turns 40. She is an attractive single woman who works in her profession, has a relationship with her boss and is somehow alone. Her best friend since childhood, Lenny, gives her a surprise suitcase for her birthday. For years, unclaimed suitcases are auctioned off at the airport without knowing the contents. Lenny bought one of these suitcases for Kristin. Of course Kristin is curious and finds in this suitcase, which must have belonged to a woman, a bundle of love letters. More and more she falls for these letters and the unknown who wrote them.

In war-torn Galicia, devout Jew Mendel Singer’s family faces hardship: his eldest sons are conscripted - one flees to Austria, then America - while their frail newborn Menuchim is deemed unfit to emigrate. Torn between love and survival, Mendel must choose who goes to the New World.

For business reasons, Rosemary is supposed to marry Peter, a stranger to her, according to her father's wishes. However, while fleeing from America back to Europe, Rosemary and Peter meet under assumed names and fall in love.

Miranda and Josef's relationship is shaken when Anastasia enters the couple's life. The chronology of a partnership unfolds: from getting to know each other to the fading of passion.

It is a powerful predator, one of the most elusive animals in Patagonia and rarely filmed. In the very South of Chile the Pumas' hunting grounds lie in the awe-inspiring Torres del Paine National Park, follow a mother Puma as she rears her cubs in the wild, teaching them to survive and thrive.

KILLING STELLA is an ice-cold examination of a failed marriage and the self-reproach of a wife and mother. It is a prequel to THE WALL in both literary and cinematic terms.

Live performance of Puccini's opera at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Piotr Beczala stars as Rodolfo with Anna Netrebko as Mimi, Massimo Cavalletti as Marcello and Nino Machaidze as Musetta. Daniele Gatti conducts the Vienna Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children's Choir.

Facebook, Amazon and Google provide us with around the clock access to the convenient digital world! Surveillance cameras on the streets take care of our security. But who actually collects our fingerprints, iris scans, online shopping preferences, and social media postings? Don't we care about our privacy anymore? In his unique charming and curious way filmmaker Werner Boote travels around the world to explore the "brave new world" of total control. EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL by Werner Boote (Plastic Planet, Population Boom) - an evocative film about the self-evidence of surveillance. In cinemas 25th of December 2015.

Phillip Hochmair is a young, successful actor with engagements at big theatres in Vienna and Hamburg. His life is marked by learning new texts by heart, rehearsals, and performances, thus gradually losing contact with the reality of everyday life. Only when he meets his uncle Walter, whom he didn't know about before and establishes an ambiguous friendship with, and also faces his neighbour Victor’s destiny, he discovers with full force how cruel the daily battle for survival can be.

Part three of the trilogy, centred on the Swiss tenor August Schram, is now located in an opera house during a running performance of Donizetti's humorous melodrama "L'elisir d'amore" and furnished with a memorable cast of characters.

Connie needs money. When a mysterious watch manufacturer asks her to investigate possible insurance fraud, the problem seems to be solved for the time being. But then it gets really thick for Conny. It seems to be about murder and the client could be the killer himself. Unfortunately, Conny has already fallen in love with him.

The focus of the story is on the relation between the femme fatale and an escaped prisoner, who manages to save himself from the clutches of the vamp in the very last minute (no spoiler, the end of the film is missing!). A dream reveals to him the real nature of duchess Leda Orlonia/geisha/marchesa Rochefou, and he decides to leave the ‘woman with the many names’ for a kind-hearted and decent American girl.

The inhabitants of St. Maria curiously register the exotic film crew who want to shoot a Bollywood blockbuster in their home village. This is the brainchild of former local Franzi, now a production assistant in the city, who never wanted to return due to heartbreak: the ambitious Franzi has had enough of her home village and is pursuing a career in film in Vienna. When an idyllic and authentic backdrop is needed for a Bollywood movie, she quickly suggests her former home. The Indian crew is thrilled and invades the sleepy mountain village with huge catering buses, llamas and exotic dancers. Two cultures that couldn't be more different collide...

After a mix-up with a newspaper advertisement, a shop-girl and a millionairess are mistaken for one another by two businessmen. A musical romantic comedy.

Alex is intersex. Although he has XY chromosomes, his sex is ambiguous. When Alex was an infant, his mother authorised genital reassignment surgery, and he was thereafter raised female. Now Alex is an adult, and he is consumed by feelings of anger and loss. After meeting other "XY women" and doing a lot of soul-searching, he decides he wants to live as a man.

This first film adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play about class distinctions was made in 1955 in the Vienna Rosenhügel studios, but it was only premiered five years later. Curt Bois plays the rich capitalist Puntila who only becomes somewhat agreeable when he is drunk (which he is most of the time in this film). In his inebriated state, Puntila not only gets amorously involved with three different ladies but also suggests that his daughter Eva marries his chauffeur Matti. The chauffeur, however, doesn’t really agree…

Suspecting her missing husband is being held as a political prisoner, a noblewoman disguises herself as a male prison guard. She discovers him weakened in the darkest dungeon, but will she be able to rescue him before it is too late?

Yarn Over is a stop motion animation about loneliness in older adults. The short film tells the story of a widowed man finding solace in a local knitting group. This narrative aims to encourage older adults to participate in social events to combat isolation.

In Rimini (2022) and Sparta (2022), Ulrich Seidl followed the lives of two brothers, Richie and Ewald, respectively. The former is a crooner long past his prime yet still beloved by hordes of late-middle-aged female fans who can also buy his sexual attention; the latter is a technician living in Romania and wrestling with his pedophile desires. These two tales were supposed to be told in one film – and now they finally are! The result offers a staggeringly different experience of the narrative(s). It's far more cerebral, above all a work of ideas.

Richard Strauss' last stage work is an opera about opera as an art form, depicting the creation of a music drama in a wise and witty way. Which came first the words or the music? That is the question Strauss and his librettist Clemens Krauss address through the story of a Countess torn between a composer and a poet.

A girl from a noble family falls in love with a boy in financial difficulties.

In Garcia Lorca's mother tongue, death is a woman: "la muerte". Daniel slips into the role of "death as a female" and speaks before a video camera on the life and death of the famous Spanish poet. Then the story begins.

David, an author in his mid-30s, travels to the Greek island of Tinos with his wife Nina to spend time in a secluded beach house in the off-season. While David searches for inspiration for his new novel, Nina is looking for a new spark in their life.

Professor Bock is to inaugurate the museum, the construction of which was donated by a generous patron who remains anonymous. He learns that it is his brother's wife, a former dancer, and whom he hates. But her daughter falls in love with Jim, the son of the ex-dancer, and everything will work out.

In the small town of Rechnitz a terrible crime against humanity was performed during the holocaust. Until now, no-one dares to talk about it.

Join Georg Riha and his team in this ORF-UNIVERSUM production and discover one of the most beautiful stretches along the Danube.Featuring a great number of aerial shots, this documentary captures the cultural and natural beauty of the entire region, as well as portraying the Alzinger family in their vineyards during the seasons.The Wachau, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is presented from unusual perspectives, offering spectacular views of this picturesque area.

Witty, literary and intellectual Kammerspiel film which presents the day after the end of the world as an allegory.

It’s the early 1950s and little Franzi is growing up in the small Austrian town of Judenburg. Her oppressive family home is dominated by her feverish and mentally ill father, who is rigid and unpredictable. Her father, who regularly delivers halves of pork for the butcher, spent several years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Algeria and Syria – a period which he partly glorifies but which still also haunts him. Franzi immerses herself in this world by looking at an abundance of beguiling yet disturbing photographs taken at the time by her father. Her own childish fantasy realm of fairy tales and picture books soon intermingle with nightmares as reality merges with imagination, war, horror and beauty.

Irina, a single-mother, must move in with her sugary sweet mother-in-law, Trudi. In spite of feeling suffocated by Trudi’s relentless generosity and greasy home-cooked meals, Irina always tries to maintain a grateful facade. Yet she’s plagued by a creeping sense of unease and is even terrorized by spine-chilling visions when she’s alone. How long can she grit her teeth and swallow everything while denying the rage that is growing in her gut?

Behind the back of her father, a big tradesman of organic food, a young journalist investigates the farmers which supply him. And she discovers an unexpected secret.

The death of Ottakring's last godfather and the encounter with a very clever young woman unintentionally turn the clever crook Sammy into the business-minded driving force of an Austrian parallel world in the midst of the global economic crisis.

In October 1936, a high official in the Austrian government receives a letter from a German Jewish woman with whom he had an affair in 1925 asking him to help place an 11-year-old, half Jewish boy in a good Austrian school. Is the child his? Should he help? And above all should he help now, at a time when Nazis are becoming powerful in Austria?

Against the backdrop of a European cityscape, worlds intersect when a woman and a man on separate travels meet, or rather, collide on the screen. Their affects mingle, creating a zone between their bodies in which something happens: intoxication, stillness, desire and love. Something that is neither one nor the other's, but a third creation between dreaming and being awake, where possibilities are held and lost. This is URDA / BONE.

Anna Haslböck, writing as Karina Norden, hires young drummer Nicolas Auer to pose as her lover and boost sales for her new book on dating younger men. Nicolas, recently dumped by a girlfriend influenced by Anna’s advice, reluctantly plays along while Anna secretly maintains a ten-year affair with industrialist Wolf Richter. As Anna and Nicolas co-host a fledgling talk show, Nicolas begins a real affair with journalist Martina Schwarz, forcing Anna to juggle contracts, jealousy, and public image. When Wolf announces plans to marry a society beauty, Anna’s world unravels - she confesses her long affair to Wolf’s wife Ilse live on air. The on-set revelations by Ilse and her partner Bodo mirror Anna’s own sacrifices. In the end, the show is a hit, Anna frees Nicolas from their PR pact, and Martina forgives him, leaving Anna to rebuild her personal and professional life.

The story of the love between a female robot named Ainoa that discovers how valuable and precious life is and the young resistance fighter Yuri. Thanks to his love of Ainoa he overcomes his fanaticism and, like her, becomes human.

In order to be able to marry the princess, the miller boy Hans has to find his way to hell. If he fails to steal three golden hairs from the devil, all is lost.

Follow-up film to „Seine Tochter ist der Peter“: It’s a story about a lawyer, who is in love with his colleague, and a couple hot to divorce, who are represented by both lawyers, who, as a result, have a fall out with each other. But everything will be set right by little Elisabeth, known as “Peter”.

Somewhere in the Salzburg mountains, young poacher Hans tries to conquer the heart of pretty schoolteacher Helga but is overthrown by forest warden Thomas. Krambambuli, the dog he once saved from being drowned, indirectly causes his death.

Gabriel is running from his family. His dream of a life in freedom shatters when his hands resolve to leave him.

Three men fall in love with a woman from a window photograph. When they find her living as a recluse in an isolated Hungarian mansion, they decide against a visit because she wouldn't live up to their idealized images of her.

A Tyrolean Production. Three men, a life coach and the search for an appropriate therapy.

When a worker digging up a rose bed in the garden of a rich, influential factory owner uncovers a skeleton, suspicion spreads: Is the man who is so respected in the town possibly a murderer?

Five women celebrate their reunion in an Alpine hut, but their past blurs the atmosphere.

Ana and Nicolae, a young Romanian couple, travel by bus from Bucharest to Vienna with the prospect of making quick money by handing over a stolen car. As soon as they arrive, however, they are reassured that the car is not yet ready for them. Ana then wants to go back to Romania, Nicolae would rather travel further west. They are stuck penniless in Vienna.

On New Year's Eve 1900, Paul Holzgruber started a new praxis as a radiologist. The young Maximiliane Frey is his assistant and they have worked side by side for years helping people. Holzgruber repeatedly points out the dangers of radiation to Maximiliane, but is silent about the ulcers on his hand and the severe pain they have caused. Maximiliane has gotten to know the widower Axel von Bonin and has fallen in love with him. But then she is diagnosed with incurable cancer. To spare Axel the inevitable grief over her impending death, she leaves him and dedicates what is left her life to medicine.

The parents of a talented 23-year-old pianist were killed in an accident on the way to her wedding to a career-oriented violinist. She tries to keep the family together and gets custody of her three underage siblings. Although her relationship breaks up and her job suffers considerably, the young woman remains in good spirits and manages to bring calm to the sometimes turbulent and problematic family life.

Gare uses the knowledge that his wife Amelia was imprisoned and had an illegitimate son to make her his subject. When her son Marc Jordan appears and falls in love with her daughter Judith, Amelia is forced to tell the truth. Gare then tyrannizes Judith. She tries to escape, but a fatal accident occurs first.

In southern Carinthia, about ninety percent of all inhabitants spoke Slovenian before 1910. Today it is on average a single digit percentage. In this very personal essay documentary, Andrina Mračnikar formulates a political urgency: What happens when one's mother tongue is taken away in everyday life. What must politicians do to counteract the disappearance of a language whose protection is enshrined in the Austrian constitution.