Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

In the final days of the war, little Hans escapes certain death: he flees from a Nazi euthanasia center. Years later, Hans encounters the doctor who is responsible for destroying his life...

There’s excitement in St. Johann, when the lawyer and notary Dr. Junhnickel from Vienna arrives and brings an offer from a mysterious Brazillian: On the cover of a magazine is a young girl, obviously from the country, and in the background is the village landscape of St. Johann. The Brazilian has fallen in love with the picture and wants to marry the girl. In return for finding her, the village will receive a donation of RM 5,000. Oh boy! The mayor, the shoemaker and the district clerk go off on the search for the girl! They have absolutely no luck in the photo shop, because the photographer is boiling over what he considers unfair intentions and tells them to take a hike. Nevertheless, they find the girl’s address. The model, Christl Wallner is no country girl but rather a ballet dancer, who posed for the photo to earn a litle extra money.

In the loneliness of the Lower Havel lowlands, one of the last bird paradise in Germany, twelve-year-old Lea lives alone with her father Lutz, a passionate environmentalist. She is on the cusp of adulthood, confronted with the challenges of the present and the pains of the past. She often feels lonely in the childhood-remote world in which she lives, in which schools are closed and people leave. Even the father, who has withdrawn from the world, is increasingly becoming a problem for Lea, who longs for fellowship.

Daniel Guth is a passionate doctor and is confronted with difficult decisions every day. The fate of little Tessa is particularly close to his heart. The young patient is diagnosed with an insidious arterial disease. She has to have an operation. Shortly before the procedure, Tessa loses her nerve and escapes after her parents argue. Daniel is forced to work with his closest competitor if he wants to save the child's life and find Tessa in time.

Both a beguiling meditation on the aesthetic of a city and a loving tribute to a great architect, Heinz Emigholz's documentary examines urban Los Angeles through the houses of Austrian-American architect Rudolph Schindler. Eschewing the documentary conventions of voice-over narration and archival photos, Emigholz mixes artfully composed images of more than 40 Schindler creations with an ambient soundscape to produce a singular viewing experience.

Intent on shaking up the ultimate 'sacred cow' for Jews, Israeli director Yoav Shamir embarks on a provocative - and at times irreverent - quest to answer the question, "What is anti-Semitism today?"

For thirty years Anna sat at the checkout in the supermarket; now she is retired and doesn't know what to do with her life. She drifts through Viennese museums and cafés until one day in the park she gets into a conversation with a group of bikers. And suddenly the old lady reveals quite unexpected talents ...

Franz is unlucky. After a motorcycle accident, the super cop is placed on sick leave. His incompetent rival cop, Kleiber, who has long been under pressure from his position, takes over command of the police station. His bad luck is that he attracts misfortune like a magnet. When a young couple with a millionaire heiress moves into the nearby castle, Franz ignores his sick leave and takes a job as a caretaker, secretly uncovering a major murder plot. And indeed, little Funny's uncle is hatching murderous plans. A finely spun web of murderous suspicions quickly emerges, fitting together perfectly in a seemingly perfectly orchestrated crime puzzle made up of incriminating evidence. But before Franz can bring the alleged perpetrators to justice, he himself is mistaken for the murderer.

Katrina Mercier and her husband arrive in Canada's far north to run a trading post. Another trading post owner, Langrand, and police sergeant Spenlow, the only two civilized people in the area, fall in love with Katrina. They follow the husband and wife as they head further north for a chance that, until now, the husband has been reluctant to take. One day, Mercier catches his partner, an adventurer, trying to take advantage of Katrina; he kills him but is wounded. The couple and the two other whites attempt to return south, but Mercier dies of his wound along the way. Caught in a storm, the three survivors get lost; the dogs abandon them. Spenlow, realizing that Katrina loves Langrand, sacrifices himself to leave them his supplies; he is devoured by wolves. Langrand and Katrina are saved in extremis by a hunter.

Vienna, sometime around 1680: Augustin makes fun of Leopold I mistress and in doing so, stirs up the passions of the people against the luxury-enjoying rulers, who neglect their people. He is arrested and sent to prison. When the plague breaks out, he manages to get out of prison, but accidentally ends up in a mass grave for victims of the plague

1974 French TV film

Travel journalist Charly, who was abandoned as a baby, happens to discover a portrait of a woman who looks like her in a brochure about a castle in Styria. When she travels there to find out more about her past, both the old lord of the castle and his son Andreas and his fiancée Vera are delighted by her interest.

A family has the death of a pregnant daughter on its conscience. Their hollow understanding of tradition leads them to insist on revenge by the sword, and so the girl's boyfriend must die.

Two men and one woman are involved in a dramatic triangle between love and passion, transgression and betrayal. Florian Flicker has set Karl Schönherr's "Der Weibsteufel" in Austria's borderland shortly after the turn of the last century. In the remote swamps next to the March River, Hans and Jana are living in a criminal idyll that comes tumbling down when a young soldier enters the picture.

Adele Spitzeder, an actress of medium talent, finds the role of her life as a dazzling financial genius, but in truth the operator of a gigantic pyramid scheme. With a brilliant appearance and empty promises, she serves the hopes and greed of her fellow human beings with virtuosity. With the help of a never-ending stream of money, she buys her way out of situations that would have landed others in prison long ago. Her enemies are just waiting for the pyramid to collapse and bury Adele - and countless small investors with her.

After breaking up with her boyfriend Daniel, Anna just wants to hole up somewhere and recover. But she should have had a closer look at the fineprint of her rental contract – for the old Viennese appartment it is a creature with never ending appetite, living off the youth of its residents. There is no escaping it anymore when Anna faces herself in the mirror as an old lady. Unless she deliveres a new victim…

Dr. Reinhard Nagl would rather hide behind the walls of his extravagant Austrian castle than embrace the outside world, but when his 70th birthday approaches he is surprised by his overzealous best friend from childhood, Lorenz Zweig. Zweig invites laughter back into the walls of his friends home, enticing the staff to embrace romance and even conspiring to reunite Nagl with his first love - Magdalena. Has Zweig arrived too late or can Nagl learn to live before he dies.

Hypochondriac Hermann Ladner is invited on a Mediterranean cruise by his late wife's brother, Heinz Wucher. However, Heinz gambles away the money for the tickets and Hermann sets off for Italy in his caravan. Heinz, meanwhile, has sneaked into the caravan and travels along as a blind passenger.

The long dead ancestress of a noble family returns to haunt her last two remaining descendants. She can not rest until the entire family line has passed away. When she reappears, the household knows it is an ill omen. The patriarch of the family is old, and without a son. He is eager for his daughter to marry. She has her eye on a handsome young nobleman named Jaromir, but he isn't quite who he appears to be. This may be the opportunity the restless spirit has been waiting for for so long...

A story about Hannah (Anna Åström), a young woman who is very shy on the outside, but whose inner world is deep, exciting and vibrant. One day, Hannah notices a house that looks as if it is cut out from a hip home decorating magazine. Intrigued, she decides to break in and try to find out who owns this emotionless beautiful home equipped with high-end technology. While at first Hannah enjoys the luxury, she starts to notice on each visit that Max (Stipe Erceg), the owner of the house, is excessively obsessed with his physical possessions. He has spent a lot of time to make sure that everything external meets the society’s standards that he has forgotten himself. The things that he himself likes, the activities that make him smile, and the people who make him happy. Having realised that, Hannah starts leaving hints for Max, so as to shake him out of the the everyday emptiness and make him focus on what is important.

Taking the demise of a textile factory in Austria’s Waldviertel region as its starting point, with the antiquated manufacturing plant initially shown in full operation, this film poses the question of what work means for people’s self-image and character. After the factory goes bankrupt and closes, the filmmaker accompanies some of its employees as they continue to make their way, questioning them about their daily routines, the circumstances in which they live, about looking for work or the new jobs they find. One woman’s situation is precarious, but that doesn’t prevent her from bringing up her grandchildren. Another woman works here and there, flexible and resourceful. One man blossoms visibly in his newly unemployed state. Bit by bit, different aspects of their private lives and personal misfortunes emerge.

Horse lover Paul Scheibner has dedicated himself to an unprofitable art: The young man wants to become a rider at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. When his uncomprehending girlfriend Regina leaves him for a nouveau riche hotelier's son, he finds solace with the animal-loving stud secretary Julia. But then his beloved stallion “Maestoso” suddenly falls ill and is to be sold.

I wanted to make a portrait of my second child. Inspired by the cinema of the personal, I filmed our newborn son for 2 to 5 seconds every day.

There are favorites in every race - those who are not permitted to lose again - and outsiders - who are unable to lose again.

Vienna, 1995. Jasmin, Tamara, Valentin, Senad and Roman live near the northern border of Austria. Their lives repeatedly intersect and drift apart. The characters involved are young migrants from the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland and Austria itself. Strangers in a strange land, they feel a sense of loss in their new, temporary environment. The five-some meet and get close to each other, hopelessly clinging to friendships and relationships with no future. They frequent cafés and train stations dreaming of a better tomorrow. Often, they just fall back on the prospect of short-term affection in yet another doomed romantic or sexual encounter. Trying hard to suppress the memories of war and alienation, they try to find moral strength and warmth through one another.

Sometime, hopefully not too soon, in a place wherever but not here, all life will have moved underground after a failed uprising. Everybody wears a mask, more often than not of the variety seen only at Halloween these days. In this scary universe (that on closer inspection looks like a twisted, perverted version of our here and now...), a man with a gorilla mask is searching for a little boy with a hessian hood. His quest leads him into a maze of depravity, a pandemonium of all our nightmares and darkest desires – where something awaits that he had already given up on: love.

The Loiblpass is situated in the mountains between Austria and Yugoslavia: 12km from the village of Neumarktl and 10km from Ferlach in Carinthia. Between 1943 and 1945, political prisoners from the Mauthausen concentration camp drove a tunnel into the mountains at an altitude of 1200m. To this day, two people have been linked by this tunnel: Janko Tisler was an engineer in charge of the building site in 1944; today he lives in Krize, south of the tunnel. Dr. Sigbert Ramsauer, the SS doctor of the camp at the site then, at the age of 80 still practises in Klagenfurt. Janko Tisler fights against forgetting, Dr. Ramsauer wishes he were forgotten. The history of the tunnel has become theirs as well.

Friedrich is the clumsy husband from whom his better half vainly expects a wild temper. He wants to make his wife, who is flirting with divorce and the house friend, jealous by feigning an affair. He laboriously organizes an amateurish "in flagrante delicto" with the harmless neighbor, pours alcohol into himself, and stumbles into his first drunken stupor.

As Christof Loy put it: Così fan tutte invites us to embrace the complexity of life and face the future with heads held high. In his staging of the version he abridged with Joana Mallwitz for the Salzburg Festival 2020 the focus is wholly on the figures and the subtle choreography of their emotional states — in a space that like a magnifying glass exposes the intricate mechanisms between the characters. In this way the production leads the protagonists and the audience to experience the ‘serene calm’ that can perhaps indeed cure our own ‘distempers’.

A downhill run is two minutes of skiing at the limit, a feat of strength between triumph and tragedy. The risk of a fall or serious injury is always present. The thrill prevails and is almost addictive, regardless of all the side effects.

The first embodiment of (a) concept of structural activity in cinema comes in Kren's Bäume im Herbst, where the camera as a subjective observer is constrained within a systematic or structural procedure, incidentally the precursors of the most structuralist aspect of Michael Snow's later work. In this film, perception of material relationships in the world is seen to be no more than a product of the structural activity in the work. Art forms experience.

The logistics company Kovacs Trucking, where truck driver Walter works, is being digitalized. Soon, worlds and worldviews collide—both Walter’s and the business consultant’s, who, just like Walter, is fighting for her position. By spontaneously changing his route on the day of his daughter Jenny’s football final, Walter makes a fatal decision.

Annika dreams of having a synthetic mermaid fin -- expensive fun for the supermarket cashier who longs for distraction from the worries of her everyday life.

About a pair of twin sisters who both want to succeed in showbiz. Problems arise when it's obvious only one sister has the talent to succeed. The other sister becomes extremely jealous and cause a minor chaos.

The art restorer Henriette Frey moves from Vienna to Krems to live with her friend, the musician Ferdinand Sternheim. At a vernissage, Ferdinand introduces her to the gallery owner Hartmut Ille, who proudly presents the up-and-coming painter and new star in the art firmament Hubertus Krajczik. But Krajczik's up-and-coming career soon comes to an abrupt end.

Young and eager police recruit Chris shoots a mentally ill man on duty. He is celebrated a hero, but soon after, traumatic symptoms begin to surface. In a desperate attempt not to be exposed by his tough superior Konstantin, he resorts to excessive violence, in order to hide his trauma and fulfill his dream of becoming an elite cop.

Joseph von Träubesser is a scion of a wealthy aristocratic family. He's not satisfied with idle bliss but is ambitious and tries to become a good painter. His family and especially his nephew Leonid, who could be taken for his twin, think he's cracked. Fabian Cabanas, a famous painter, isn't at all pleased with his life. Apion Herbst, a postman and spiritualist, holds séances when off duty and helps Fabian to a new body. And Joseph too profits from this séance.

Widerstandsmomente (Moments of Resistance) carries voices, writings, and objects from the anti-Nazi resistance into the present. Politically engaged women of today respond to historical resistance and make links to current events. A line is drawn from what was before and what is today to what might be: a society based on solidarity without discrimination or exclusion.

Opera countertenor Alex Gottfarb is not alone – his inner self is crowded. Some other personae live within him – shy Alexander, sexy Sandra, teenager Lex and a seven-year-old prodigy Xandi. Each one of them has different ideas of what life should look like and yet they are all extremely dependent on each other. With the help of Helene, who loves him, Alex succeeds to get in touch with his cohabitants. Cascades of turbulent events and tragicomic misunderstandings accompany Alex’ struggle for identity, love and freedom.

After his wife dies, Toni only gets involved in affairs. His latest conquest is the American Emma, who wants to go on vacation with him to Lake Wolfgang. When they arrive, they discover that the apartment is already occupied by two other vacationers. The apartment has been rented out twice by mistake and now they have no choice but to share the house. Friction soon arises between Toni and the cookbook author Julia.

Shortly before the end of the war: Disillusioned Austrian soldiers crammed into a barracks in a prison camp welcome a new arrival who has nothing better to do than rave to the men, who have been separated from their homeland for years, about his Viennese lover. When the womanizer mentions the name of his latest love affair, Manhardt, her husband, jumps at him in outrage; the adulterer falls and dies. Acquitted of murder and returned to Vienna, Manhardt cannot get over his Anni's infidelity. Friends and a second fateful coincidence help.

Using archive film material never seen before, Hollywood veteran Leon Askin portrays Adolf Lanz (1874-1954), the man who gave Hitler his ideas.

Edith, a young orphan, is exploited as a waitress and bullied by her adoptive father. But she has a dream: she wants to become a star. One day the Orient Express, which never stops at the little station across the café she works in, is forced to pull up due to a technical incident. And out of a carriage gets ... a company of dancers, who start rehearsing before Edith's amazed eyes. She meets the director of the company, handsome dancing star Harry Belmont, who takes an interest in her beauty and in her natural talent. When she leaves her obnoxious father for Vienna, Harry is absent. She nearly gets seduced by a libidinous man but, after a narrow escape, she gets a job from Treberg, the owner of the restaurant she had dined in. Treberg finds her there, hires her as a dancer and the pair soon meets tremendous success. A star is born but, realizing that he comes second to her, he prefers to vanish.

A documentary that analyzes the modern educational system and argues that it squelches children's capacity for imagination, creativity, and independent thought.

Luna rebels against the indifference of her artsy friends by writing a punk song about Laugo, the construction worker from across the street. Will the clashing worlds of affluent neglect and working life lead to the collapse of their romance?

A closely observant film about bodies and touching, proximity and distance and the power of attraction. The aloof Alex works in a training workshop for craftsman where he avoids the attempts of his girlfriend to get close to him physically. At the same time, he’s not at all certain about how to deal with other forces of attraction confronting him . In the small space, between working bodies, behavioural patterns are deciphered and the underlying injuries exposed.

The meticulous court councilor Geiger suddenly realizes: 18-year-old Mariandl, who is applying to study music with him, is his own daughter. Remorsefully, he decides to fulfill his fatherly duties and travels to Dürnstein, where he met Mariandl's mother, Marianne, 19 years ago. She runs an inn that is on the verge of bankruptcy due to a lack of guests. Marianne is forced to marry a wealthy hotelier. But when Geiger suddenly appears before her, old feelings rekindle, and more than just friendship develops between Geiger's secretary, Peter, and Mariandl.

Maria Thaler, the recently widowed landlady of an inn in the picturesque Weineck in the Wachau region, gives birth to twins. At the same time, kitchen maid Rosina also gives birth to twins in the same house, albeit illegitimate. Mayor Scherzinger exploits the growing rumor that quadruplets were born in the inn to market Weineck as a tourist attraction. With complete success!