Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

Four men on a roofl. One of them wants to jump off, while the others are singing a fare-the-well song.

«Time is money» is an oft-repeated expression in our modern performance-oriented society. But how does it affect us as individuals, and influence our society? Director Konrad Wakolbinger deconstructs this common and unquestioned concept, and shows, with subtle humor, how our understanding of time, work, and their interdependence has changed over the centuries.

The film chronicles the story of how the Nazis and the IOC turned, to their mutual benefit, a small sports event into the modern Olympics. The grand themes and controversial issues from the 1936 Games have continued to this day: Monumentality, budget overruns, collusion with authoritarian regimes, corruption and sometimes even bribery.

Alex works as a project manager for an automobile parts supplier and is sick of it. It's obvious just looking at him. When the next project is announced already at the final meeting for the last one, he leaves without a word and decides to change his life. He meets Anna, a film student, and lapses into the idea that she should shoot a documentary about his life. Maybe it will be easier for him to start a new life after first passing review over the old one?

Franz Hofnagel has been a prisoner in a psychiatric institution for 22 years, where he was sent by his own lawyer. The fact that he has become fat during his time there and from the medication suits his plans... his lawyer will not recognize him when he uses his first vacation in so many years to take bloody revenge on the fraudulent lawyer for robbing him of his farm, his wife... ultimately his life. He thinks.

Six short episodes about a car key, a flask, a screw, a nut, a pocket dictionary, and a photograph, the pocket contents of five lumberjacks and an automobile salesman.

The film shows a convent in Alto Adige run by just two nuns, bilogical sisters. To make sure that "those out there don´t think two nuns no longer make a convent", they try to keep up a full range of activities. The women´s headstrong character and their stubborn insistence on autonomy and self-dependency creates situations that are both touching and funny, and entirely unexpected in a place like this.

The single farmer Christian is highly sought after by the young, marriage-minded women of the area, but so far he has successfully evaded all matchmaking attempts. Last time, the somewhat bawdy country women Vroni and Petronella were offered to him as potential wives at the marriage market, but this time too he firmly rejected them. However, these young ladies feel personally attacked by his rejection and are now plotting revenge. To do so, they first need to get close to Christian, so Vroni and Petronella disguise themselves as a pig-suckling girl and a stable boy, respectively, and go to Christian's farm looking for work.

R.I.P Rest in Pieces is an intimate portrait of artist Joe Coleman, who is known around the world as a shamanic, moral voice diagnosing the ills of 21st century America. Coleman holds nothing back, telling us of a world wracked with tumorous cities, perversion, divorce, violence, atomic bombs, and a human race destroying itself simply because we are born.

He's known as "Tyrol's Zappa" and a "real anarchist." Whether folk music, jazz or what's known as serious music, Werner "Preisegott" Pirchner has in a creative way greatly expanded upon the limited acoustic range of his homeland, enriching it with some unfamiliar sounds from around the globe. Whoever comes into contact with him, such as Josef Hader and Tobias Moretti, can sense the power of his music, lets it carry them away, and embraces it wholeheartedly.

Mr. Josef is an old-school servant who works in the house of the banker Türkheim. One day, he falls in love with a stray little dog and secretly takes the trusting animal into his home. But then bitter times begin for the old servant: Türkheim's domineering sister Auguste will not tolerate the dog in the house under any circumstances.

A look back at the eventful life of Niki Lauda. The documentary tells of Lauda's childhood, his meteoric career in motorsport, marked by his dramatic accident and his unique comeback, right up to the end of his racing career, as well as Niki Lauda's reorientation as a pilot, airline manager and clever entrepreneur.

An international topic documentary on feminism and gender equality. The film reflects on current debates and analyses the potential of intersectional feminism to profoundly change our future societies.

Brunhilde Pomsel was a stenographer for Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Many people think that the dangers of fascism have been overcome, but she makes it clear that this is not the case.

Shot in Rome and Salzburg’s natural theatre, the film uses cutting and sewing as metaphors for love, separation, and the craft of montage. Cloth being trimmed, hands clapping, and tools striking accompany images of tailoring, architectural restoration, and Beavers himself in a new suit, linking gesture and sound to the editing process.

The fairy Lacrimosa's daughter lives with a forest farmer. If she marries a poor man, her mother will regain her magical powers. «Envy» wants to prevent this and turns the forest farmer into a hard-hearted millionaire.

Vienna, 1989: Journalist André Müller, known for his radical interviews with celebrities, travels to his hometown to interview his mother for a major weekly newspaper. In a desperate struggle, he tries to finally break the silence and extract from his mother the secrets of her life and his, which are closely linked to 20th-century Austrian-German history.

In the spring of 1980, Esther Jochmann, a young Austrian woman, flies to San Salvador. Her husband, a journalist, has been killed. She has to identify his corpse so that the authorities will allow it to be transferred to Europe. She learns that Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was also a victim of an assassination, had granted a taped interview to her husband. Padre Manuel hands the tape over to her. Esther accompanies the Padre and John, an American reporter, who are trying to find the murderers.

“Jimmie” is told through the eyes of a 4-year old boy who has to go on a journey with his father to a safer land, leaving his mother at home in Sweden.

She is the godmother of performance art. With her shocking public actions she created in the late 60s images that have burned into the general visual memory until today. The life and work of the Austrian artist Valie Export exemplify a development in art history in which women sought and found new ways and means of expression. Her work provides a feminist counterpart to the Viennese actionism of her time, which has influenced numerous artists of subsequent generations. The innovative diversity of her artistic approaches makes Valie Export an icon of 20th century art history.

Two dancers move through an empty apartment and stretch out in the available space. From the window, you can see they are in Vienna’s Alterlaa housing project, a satellite city. Life feels opaque next to the strange beauty of the concrete walls and the green terraces; it is sufocating to live in pre-designed happiness. An elderly woman drags herself through the complex, trying to leave her life behind. In a place that houses 9000 people, you can find absolutely everything. That’s the fun of it but also the misery.

Are you happy? You don't have to answer right away. There is an island in the Mediterranean where the question concerning happiness is taken very seriously. A man comes and is drawn into a confusing game. A child an a mysterious woman play an important role in the game. He is mistaken for someone else and gradually sees the possibility of leaving his former life behind and finding happiness on the island. Is this only an illusion which should be rejected?

Originally commissioned by an Austrian couple in 1961 to photograph a travel diary documenting their wild game hunt, Kubelka shot three hours of film and recorded fourteen hours of audio. Over the next few years, Kubelka toiled in the editing bay, producing a work charged with intricate, ironic brutality.

An experimental study about the love between Franz Kafka and his adored Felice based on their correspondence.

The freely adapted short story, written by the famous author HP Lovecraft, will reveal dreadfully poetic images to the viewer and give insight into a man's struggle for survival and his fight against the loss of memory. His spectacular escape from human creatures that live in the woods,who have lost all humanity and turned into animals, leads him directly to a mysterious house whose owner will very soon confront him with his mad rage. The subtle dialogues between the two of them, will end in a carnage. At full tilt, the kinkiness of H.P Lovecraft's short story transforms into the transparent struggle of survival of a man who has lost everything in this post-apocalyptic world, a world that slowly wipes him out.

The accomplishments of four handicapped ten-year-olds are recorded on camera. Their determination to do and create is obvious in each action.

New Year's Concert 2020

This film, dramatizing Weininger's life, is an adaptation of the 1982 play Soul of a Jew by Israeli writer Joshua Sobol. Weininger's last despondent hours are depicted in a dramatic furioso. His whole life passes by like distorted images in a mirror. The young genius fights a desperate battle against time, his fellow men - and against himself.

Artur's released from the sheltered workshop that his marriage has become. A new woman enters his life. His relationships subjected to stress test. A tribute to love in the form of a black comedy.

In Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi industrialized moldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Through its notable structure and its captivating rhythms, In Comparison presents various methods of labor production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.

The summits and sheer mountain ridges of Austria’s "Little Siberia" funnel the freezing air from snow-covered peaks into a gigantic hollow – a high-level plateau at 1,000 metres from which it cannot escape: Lungau is Austria’s coldest region. Creeks and streams start higher here, and create bogs, moors and countless alpine lakes. Summer is short but lively, as eagles rear their precious young and ermines eat their fill before the sparse winter returns, while black alpine salamanders give birth to live miniature versions of themselves beneath the tree-line.

Martín is a young Argentinean piano virtuoso and composer. For four years, he has been a patient of El Borda psychiatric hospital. Music filled up his life. Now he is trying to return to life outside the asylum walls, while working on his new opus, "Enfermaria".

Salzburg Festival’s first-ever performance of Charles Gounod´s most famous and most performed opera! Internationally-acclaimed tenor Piotr Beczala triumphs in the title role as soul-selling philosopher Faust: “Piotr Beczala is a world-Faust” (Kurier) and “The well-deserved crown goes to a perfectly-cast Piotr Beczala” (Abendzeitung). Ildar Abdrazakov was “celebrated” (Broadway World) for his signature role as seductive and demonic Méphistophélès. Maria Agresta as convincingly innocent Marguerite struggling to resist temptation and to gain salvation: “She is fabulous!” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). “Spectacular and photogenic” staging (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) by award winning stage director and designer Reinhard von der Thannen. The Philharmonia Chor Wien and the Wiener Philharmoniker are performing under the baton of young Argentinian conductor Alejo Pérez.

An opportunistic filmmaker exploits the ugly on-set experience of his girlfriend to dump a washed-up actor in favor of a famous star.

Best friends, a special day, one night that gets out of control. It’s the end of term. Mona celebrates the beginning of the holidays with her friends Lisa, Joana and Paul and lots of beer at the beach. Mona’s new boyfriend is missing in their quartet. He has to work as a civil servant at the Red Cross until midnight. Later they want to meet at the Open-Air. The others from their crew are already at the festival. Especially Emil and his unavoidable shadow Chin are by now partying hard as the first band enters the stage. They are going to drink away their school stress. That’s the plan. But Mona’s start to the holidays goes differently than planned.

"We, the Yazidis, became doves. Doves without wings", says Hedil. Stranded with her family in a Yazidi refugee camp in Eastern Turkey, she reminisces about her former life in Northern Iraq and recounts the horrors of her escape. The film follows two families' attempts at normality in an otherwise miserable place. (ML)

Car Love explores the car as a fetish object, blending Marx's commodity fetishism with Freud's sexual theory. It depicts a profound, intimate connection between human and machine, emphasized through BDSM scenes, transcending physicality.

Adi (Admitos) is under the protection of Apollo, the son of a man with money and relationships. The two are in jail, suspected of murder, but without evidence. So they are released. Adi loves Claudia (Alkeste), the domestic partner of his arch enemy, who finds death in a - metaphysical - duel. The power of Apollo is with Adi, who subsequently even finds out how to overcome death, after the apocalypse.

On his 40th birthday, Nikos, a solitary truck driver, arrives on a remote beach. He’s there to meet his former military buddy Christos, whom he hasn't seen for many years.

The vagabond Cocl and his companion observe Mr. Burkett and his family leaving their house for summer vacation in Ostend. As the house will be uninhabited for three months the two companions see their chance, and climb into it through a window. They find some elegant clothes. Cocl dresses himself up as a gentleman, and his companion as his servant. They put up a handwritten poster outside the house, announcing that apartments are to be let at a cheap rate. Soon five lodgers turn up: a lady who wants a room with a piano, a nervous man who needs the greatest quietness, an athlete who wants a room with thick walls, a fancy rifle shot who wants a large room, and an animal fancier. All of them pay the rent in advance. Already the first evening the five lodgers disturb each other. They rush out from their rooms, and start a fight. Mr. Burkett returns earlier than expected, and is confronted by the mess, but Cocl and his companion succeed to sneak away with the money.

Eleven-year-old Joanna, on the verge of womanhood, lives in the middle of the fairy tale-forest alone with her mother. A story between dream and reality about a girl from Zalesie and her innocent ideas about love and death.

After the catastrophe in 1986, a 30-km restricted zone was erected around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and 116,000 persons were evacuated from this area. Pripyat is a portrait of the people who still live and work there, and of those who have moved back. What is life like for these people, a life with the invisible and incomprehensible danger of radioactivity? How do they deal with the aftereffects of an accident which is claimed to be statistically improbable? Four protagonists tell their stories and provide a look at everyday life in “their“ zone.

Biopic about Ludwig van Beethoven.

Never again a relationship! - Before you know it, you're already in the middle of it again. The story actually begins with the end. Martin and Maria, faced with the ruins of their marriage, accidentally shoot each other in the course of an excessive argument. It all started so well, and they truly believed they were doing everything right this time. But even the warnings of their friends Andreas and Clarabella don't help save them from falling into a free fall of love.

Anton gets confused when he visits Thea at home the first time. They recently had great sex. But now it seems weird that the flatmate Paula knows all about that night with Thea. What does she mean with "Geh Vau", he asks. "Fucking," answers Paula. When he's ready to head out for a concert of the feminist punkband "Schapka", Thea would prefer to stay at home with the handsome young man.

Presenter Holly Hamilton tells the feelgood story of the Glentoran team who left Belfast on a European football adventure just before the First World War to win the Vienna Cup, the first ever European Cup.

"What is the taste of love?" Could it be sweet, sour, bitter or even salty? A girl embarks on an aromatic journey of love, stimulating her taste buds to the point of climax. With all senses, she explores the various forms love can take on.

Follow some of the world’s finest female athletes on a journey that takes them from the slopes of a volcano in Hawaii to the white-knuckle ride down an Alaskan giant, and other interesting places…

Various objects are having a sunny outing together in the nature.

A pregnant woman on the run from her abusive husband finds a cheap house to rent. It turns out she is not alone in her new home...

A condensed omnibus of all twelve chapters of Film ist. by Gustav Deutsch. Chapters 1-6 consists almost exclusively, of sequences from existing scientific films, while chapters 7-12 is a collection of moving pictures from the first thirty years of a medium which was then still silent.