Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

The film follows two days in the life of a former child star who rose to fame nearly 20 years ago in a major sci-fi blockbuster. Overwhelmed by media attention and school issues, he quit acting. Now, he's trying to redefine himself amidst hate comments, public recognition, journalists, and constant comparisons to a colleague from the film set.

Live performance from the Vienna State Opera, 6 May 2010.

The twelve-year old immigrant Veysel and his family have a hard time to become integrated into Austrian life. They have more and more inner family-oriented problems. Veysel's neighbour Cem teaches him how to pronounce a poem in German for school. At the time when Veysel wants to take the courage to recite it to his secret love Ana, the immigration police disrupts his plans.

This structurally unique film is about the self-determination of modern man. The main character, Paul, only manages to make his own decisions through an existential, cathartic process.

Un-Documented argues against Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s film Statues Also Die (1963). Focusing on plundered objects in European museums and listening to the call of asylum seekers to enter European countries, their former colonizing powers, the film defends the idea that their rights are inscribed in these objects that were kept well documented all these years.

A cineastic meeting of two characters who are directly related to each other: Camera (Cinematographer) and Dancer. Both can define space/room, but only through interaction. They meet each other in an abstract setting (a white cube) and start a dramatic play.

After his bachelor party, a 45-year-old man wakes up in the middle of the forest but cannot find his way out. On the way he meets a young woman with memory problems who knows the way out of the forest despite all the circumstances. They make a deal: he helps her get her memories back and she takes him out of the forest. But their journey out of the forest together takes them down paths they didn’t expect.

Facebook is for “old people” and baggy pants are almost vintage. We are the generation that now has to learn to fit in the shoes of grown-ups. We are the generation "not-as-young-as-we-thought-we-were" - Y. This documentary tells our journey through the different generations and which milestones our lives hold from the viewpoint of a modern "social and connected" society. We met people of the generations before and after us, to find out what matters to them, what unites them and also divides them. We talked about communication, family, work and aging. We learned about ways of life, dreams and goals. This isn’t just a movie about generations. This is a movie about finding one’s place. This is a movie about growing up, growing old and everything in between. This is a movie about life.

"Childhoods without Borders: Voices in Motion" is a documentary in which migrant boys and girls narrate the experiences and challenges they have faced in search of a better life.

A minimalist interview-film, dealing with one of the most disturbing life-stories from the twentieth Century. An oral history about abuse, resistance and survival.

Production of the Salzuberger Festspiele 2024. French director Mariame Clément will explore the relationship between art and real life by linking the three “tales” with individual stages of Hoffmann's biography as an artist in her production. This has decisive consequences for the female characters, or rather for the view of the images that Hoffmann projects onto Stella: the angelic but emotionally cold Olympia, who turns out to be a doll;

How can cinema engage with complicity in crimes against humanity, extreme violence and state terror without conniving in it? De Facto finds answers to this question via two actors, a precisely compiled collage of texts and a deliberately reduced setting.

A debt-ridden film producer tries to sell his debut film to television, and he doesn't shy away from blackmail.

American cartoons are the starting point for Martin Arnold's new work. Sequences of short films form the basis of a process of fragmentation, deconstruction, dismantling and repetition. Arnold uses fun, family entertainment to create films with open-ended possibilities for association. His pieces, such as Hydra (2013), Charon (2013), Nix (2013) and Self Control (2011), feature characters whose anatomy is no longer recognizable as such, but rather resemble puppets, remotely controlled from the outside. Trembling hands, dancing tongues, blinking eyes and snoring mouths move like ghosts against an abyss-like deep black background, in which bodily elements constantly disappear, only to reappear once more.

Even though she is exceptionally talented, Sarah is still stuck performing at small events. Today she is performing at the wedding of her ex, Jurgen. The former couple tries to stay out of each other’s way but old memories and sacrifices emerge anyway.

The teacher Senta falls in love with the award-winning chef Stefan, who rents out his romantic winegrower's house in southern Styria to her during the summer holidays. She soon notices that a quirky gendarmerie inspector is keeping the property under surveillance. Senta finds out too late that the policeman thinks Stefan is a multiple woman murderer and that she is trapped like bait.

The clumsy Rudi is trying his skills in a number of different sports: as a horseman, cyclist, footballer, hurdler, tennis player and water sports enthusiast. This he does all for the woman who finally gives him the sweetest of kisses.

Vienna, Austria, late 1870s. After suffering an irreparable misfortune, the Austrian composer Johann Strauss Jr. (1825-99), the Waltz King, falls in love with a ballet dancer, which disappoints the famous operetta singer Marie Geistinger…

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.

An environmental spy infiltrates the global syndicate for illegal timber trading. With the aid of a hidden camera he documents the chain of illegal activities, from harvesting of the wood to the marketing of “washed” products in supermarkets. This turns out to be an excellent motor for political change.

This equine odyssey travels such little-known turf as General George Patton's involvement in a daredevil World War II coup called "Operation Cowboy" that rescued 500 of Austria's famous white Lipizzans. It is a stunning behind-the-scenes production on the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, spiced with legends even linked to the prophet Mohammed.

Sergius, a student in Paris, is called upon to ascend the throne of Deliria, and the Duke of Onnandoff comes to announce the fact accompanied by his beautiful young Duchess. The Prince, however, has gone off for a night's merrymaking in Paris, and at a popular cafe he meets and falls in love with a beautiful ex-dancer, who is none other than the Duchess of Onnandoff, who is paying a surreptitious visit to the scene of her former triumphs. A group of conspirators who wish to prevent Sergius ascending the throne, lure him to the house of the Delirian Ambassador where they intend to keep him prisoner. The young Duchess caught in a heavy shower, is given shelter at the house by the Ambassador's footman. Here she learns of the plot against the youth with whom she has spent a charming evening, and it is her wit and ingenuity that upset the plans of the conspirators and enable Sergius to secure his crown.

Just letting loose – that is Samiel’s wish for his journey to Krakow. On the bus, there is already some chemistry between him and Nina. He hopes to finally lose his virginity, but can’t really climax once he gets to that one moment. Samiel simply doesn’t feel it.

Go on an enriching journey from Mexico to Spain, onto Austria and then to China via Greece in these five moving short films where gay men overcome various obstacles in accepting who they are, and where they are going - things can only get better. The 5 short films are: If They Knew [Berak baleki] (2021); Xutaj (2022); Boom and Bloom [Neuzeit] (2022); Sexual Distancing (2022); And We Collide [潮汐平行时] (2021).

‘Surge’ places us somewhere between figuration and abstraction: its displayed forms defy full visual comprehension, as they stretch and snap in strict accordance with the complex beats and sheets of sound created by schtum.

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.

The inner lives of six people are explored. Each has a connection to the Viennese subway station Schottentor.

Vienna in the thirties. Two Jewish thieves dress up as Orthodox Jews so that they can steal without being recognized. They mingle among the guests of a Jewish weddings causing chaos.

A report from the river Mur, Austria. About the many people who enjoy the Mur as a sports and recreational space; Buddhists, biologists, surfers, fishermen, cyclists, hikers, boardwalkers and even a paddling pirate.

The bark-beetle has invaded the big forest of the general, just as a fatal illness has into the body of its owner. The general is suffering from eye cataract, preventing him from seeing the symptoms of the trees' decline, just as he is unable to see his own rottening. His wife and the writer discuss these circumstances for two scenes, until the general discovers the fact himself in the third one. Now he is going to take appropriate action.

January 1957, in a small town in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. A middle-class house, the home of two sisters, Clara and Thérèse, whose characters could not be more different. After their father is institutionalized, the two women take over the family business, which specializes in precision optics. One day, the floor of the music room collapses after being ravaged by termites. Karoly, a Hungarian refugeee and jack-of-all-trades, is hired to repair the damage. The Hungarian's presence causes ripples in the seemingly unchangeable life of the two sisters...

A documentary about the life and career of the conductor Carlos Kleiber. Featuring interviews with Placido Domingo, Brigitte Fassbaender, Manfred Honeck, Michael Gielen, and others. On the 11th July 2004 Carlos Kleiber got into his car and drove from Munich, via the Alps, to his holiday home in the remote Slovenian village of Konjsica. There he wrote a final letter to a friend in which he bid farewell to the world. A short time later the conductor, increasingly plagued by illness and suffering, was found dead.

After serving a prison sentence for no fault of her own, café violinist Helene seeks out her twin sister Betty, a famous revue star in Vienna engaged to a public prosecutor. During a sailing trip, Betty accidentally drowns. Helene, at first involuntarily, then consciously, assumes her sister’s identity. Blackmail by two criminals soon follows.

The Big Jump is an adventurous journey into the world of ski flying and this high-tech sport is shown in spectacular 3D.

In front of a round tent, a pasha is sitting on the grass; to the right of the tent's door, covered with a patterned blanket, is a flagpole - on top of which is an 8-pointed star [Saturn-Film's logo]. The pasha claps hands, and a servant comes to his bid. The lord is going to smoke from his water-pipe while he buys some new slave girls. The servant calls the seller and his two henchmen, who bring forth four girls in patterned burnooses.

One year ago, Nina survived the attacks of a serial killer. She wants to flee from these memories but one call at night recalls all memories and she is again in the middle of a murder mystery.

The Vienna State Opera celebrates the 80th anniversary of the Second Austrian Republic in the Burggarten gardens and offers a preview of the 2025–2026 season. The programme features the prestigious voices of Elīna Garanča, Jonas Kaufmann and Benjamin Bernheim, among others, with the Opera Orchestra conducted by Bertrand de Billy.

Ignaz Wuzel and Gerhard Jeschko are regulars at the espresso in the Südtiroler Platz underground station. Warden Leopold Prinz knows the problems of the children from Karlsplatz. In 1993, Elizabeth T. Spira filmed people on the Vienna subway network. Above all, it is the desperate, the lost and the forgotten who find refuge and a home in and around the subway.

A young woman is going on holiday with her parents. She narrowly escapes when her holiday fling tries to kill her, only to find out that this nasty encounter was not quite as accidental as it first seemed.

Abandoned in a park, the two-year-old girl Asia is found by Patty, a circus woman living with her husband Walter in a trailer park in San Basilio on the outskirts of Rome. With the help of Tairo, a teenager who lives with his grandma in an adjacent container, Patti gives the girl a new home for an uncertain period of time. However, Walter is concerned that they may be accused of kidnapping the girl, and he plans to report Asia's presence to the police. . Patty receives a letter from the mother in which she announces that she will collect the girl two days later. They have a farewell party, but the mother does not show up.

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.

Single mother Kathi receives day release from prison and finds her three-year-old son, who is living with her unstable mother, in bad circumstances. She is forced to find a way to enable a better future for him, while time is against her, she has to be back in prison at six pm.

We enter the gate to the cube factory on an ordinary Monday. Strange processes create an endless flow of cubes, their purpose unknown. The endlessly repeating flow hypnotizes us as our vision begins to blur. Is there an end? It wouldn’t hurt to watch a little longer…

As part of the 2006 Mozart Year, 28 Austrian filmmakers, including Ulrich Seidl, were commissioned to create a minute-long film featuring Mozart's music. Seidl decided on the slaves' chorus from Zaide: "Brothers, let us be merry and bravely defy adversity" rings out while two dimly-lit men give themselves over to purposeless pleasure. They masturbate mechanically and monotonously. Paper towels stand ready next to them, as if waiting for consummation, the climax. Nietzsche claimed that all pleasure seeks to be eternal; Brothers, Let Us Be Merry depicts the hangover left by this unfulfilled utopia.

In the Hollywood of electronic music, musicians, DJs, gogos and promoters are working on a sophisticated entertainment machine to satisfy stressed-out Western society's desire for fun, sex and freedom. Each of the "nine and a half music stories" presents part of the whole, whether of the island or of our world. It never claims to be able to tell all, but is rather a voyage with stops, almost a collection of short tales. The island is the protagonist, music however its inspiration, because in Ibiza music is the cardinal point where all lines meet

Alice and Josef are invited to spend New Year's Eve with their friends Peter and Ulli and their friends at a hut in the mountains. Alice and Josef invite the others to dinner so that everyone can get to know each other beforehand. As Peter and Ulli cancel at short notice, it turns into a dinner with strangers.

Olga Kosanović reveals the unfair absurdity of Austria’s right to residence. The single father Vladimir wants to work to be able to stay in the country with his daughter. But if he doesn’t have a residency permit, he’s not allowed to work. From this paradox, the film filters a humanistic indictment of cynical domestic policies in the land of insurmountable peaks.