Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

Short film by Daniela Zahlner.

The family is the nucleus of the nation. A short satire, on the upbringing of an eight-year old, the parent's sex life, and an evening in the living room with TV and video.

Leo Strobl, called "Turbo-Leo", is the fastest photographer around. When a tragedy takes place, he is the first one on his way to cover it. Then a young photographer shows up and a deadly race between the two commences.

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.

Loosely based on a tale by Russian master Ivan Turgenev, this finely calibrated drama mainly unfolds in the confines and surroundings of a countryside inn. A family from the big city, seeking a late-evening repast, are surprised to witness (and enjoy) a traditional form of vocal performance. A seemingly straightforward affair at first, it steadily discloses offbeat undercurrents, which gradually emerge and then fully flower in the transcendent finale.

Albania in the southeast of Europe – situated between Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro – hosts an astonishingly diverse landscape. Harmonic coastal areas lead to harsh karst landscapes. Snow-covered mountain regions, wild canyons, waterfalls, deep-blue lakes and untouched rivers are perfect conditions for an immensely rich flora and fauna. Decades of war preserved wide areas of the country from industrial exploitation, so the natural environment is still untouched.

A reconstruction, the replica of a complex emotional world made of desire and aggression: a teen film. Florian Pochlatko explores the agonies of adolescence and the rage and frustration caused by being dissatisfied with oneself.

Luisa returns to her parents' home when her father becomes bedridden. She's expected to help her mother deal with the drudgery of caring for him, but their relationship is tense and the physical contact with the man proves to be unpleasant for her. In quiet moments she remembers scenes from her childhood Long repressed and forgotten memories force their way back into the present, until a final realization brings a family secret to light.

CERN in Switzerland is a research center where they try to recreate the big bang. Nikolaus Geyrhalter follows the center's infrastructure and meets the people who created the "Large Hadron Collider".

50 Years of Rallying Five decades of rallying, from the early endurance and regularity tests of well-to-do but slightly bored aristocrats in the mid-fifties, via the first sprints on cordoned-off Scandinavian gravel roads with stars like Tom Trana or Erik Carlsson, to monstrous long distance races and today’s high-tech events in the dust. This movie tells it all over 90 gripping minutes, compiled largely from the archives of Austria’s legendary rally filmmaker, Helmut Deimel. The milestones of this spectacular journey through time are the groundbreaking cars, the great personalities, magnificent places, and the most wonderful moments of the sport. Using special features, Deimel spotlights the dynamism, the magic, the uniqueness of rallying. Interviews with the most important drivers and team bosses add colour and authenticity to the story – from enthusiasts’ intrepid adventures to the merciless sprints of today’s professionals. The movie was conceived and directed by Helmut Deimel.

Hector Sandoval, Norma Fantini, Scott Hendricks, Tania Kross, and Rosalind Plowright star in this production of the Giordano opera performed by the Vienna Symphony, Bregenz Festival Chorus, and Prague Philharmonic Choir conducted by Ulf Schirmer.

The heroine of the title grows up. Slights, dance school, a cinema of glances, of tender moments, of trivial pop songs. A cinema which takes time, makes observations and which continuously finds or invents opposite picture sequences for loneliness and breaking free...

Johann Sebastian Bach composed his Six Suites for Solo Cello in the early 1720's. Unlike the Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, composed around the same time, there is no extant autograph manuscript. Only four copies exist, of which one made by Anna Magdelena Bach is the standard performing edition Maisky has acknowledged the period instruments style of Bach in these performances. His playing is slightly more reserved, somewhat analytical, very broad and powerful with a rich and deeply resonant string sound

Suffering from unexplained vaginal pain, a frustrated acting student goes to a string of doctors, convinced that she is going to find a specialist who will figure out what’s wrong with her.

A power failure puts three households in a state of emergency. In the first flat they were just about to start a party, now they are all sitting together by candlelight. In the neighbouring flat, the residents see their conspiracy theories confirmed - after all, they have been preparing for this moment for years. And while one floor below a young man is drowning his lovesickness in vodka, there is someone else stuck in the lift.

Out of power politics, offended vanity and a desire for revenge, Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI and the King of France became accomplices in an unheard-of act: the hostage-taking of the English King Richard the Lionheart. It was the kidnapping of the century.

Tage is not a memoir of Schreiner's battle with his illness – this is merely hinted at, almost obliquely. Schreiner considered his ailing body above all an artistic challenge: What is possible, what can be developed from the set of options and perspectives such a state of being offers? Curiously enough, Tage turned into a variation of his last finished film, Garten (2019): a chamber piece shot almost exclusively in his house, featuring himself and his beloved wife Maria as well as some friends. It is also a return to a cinema of intimacy that he'd last essayed with Kinderfilm (1985). With all of that, Schreiner strove for and reached yet another level of artistic freedom with Tage, for none of his works to date are as light-footed in their movement: pure stream-of-conscious in a diaristic framework – a film as open as Schreiner's restlessly searching soul and endlessly curious heart.

Interview film with the protagonists of the New German Cinema in 1966.

Rob, a worn out robot with a corrupt memory, drowns his sorrows of his 'screwed' existence in alcohol and asks himself the essential question: what did he do wrong? He needs to remember...

"Der Viechmensch" (The Beastman/Animalman) is a documentary following a South Tyrolean farmer and his farmhand Karl who are isolated from most of the modern world.

Short drama movie.

A film about the artist Daniel Spoerri. It's actually a film about a thought by Daniel Spoerri: a film almost without Daniel Spoerri, it's actually mostly acted out by a child - to say no less than that everything somehow goes on in life, even if you die in between.

Erika Pluhar is an acclaimed Austrian stage and screen actress, singer, director, screenwriter and author. She studied at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, the Viennese academy for music and the performing arts where she graduated from.

An audiovisual allegory on communication – this film follows cable technicians in four different countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova) as they visit their customers. Each client they call on provides a glimpse into their own individual universe. With so many tools for communication, we still inhabit a modern-day Tower of Babel; an ordered discordance of personalities and perspectives.

Exposed uses short scene from a feature film – a man observes a dancing woman through a keyhole – as the raw material. Solely fragments of this tableau are visible to the viewer, and Fruhauf "re-exposes" the scene by passing the perforations of a strip of film in front of the projector so that they resemble a moving sieve. While the moving stencil allows us to see no more than portions of the scene, the narration's "peeping tom" motif is repeated in our own perception. Sight can no longer be taken for granted and therefore increases in fascination. Fruhauf also breaks up the intended movement of the found footage on the temporal level. The apparent irregularity of the fields of light scanning over the strip of film is juxtaposed with a metronomically precise rhythm which segments the scene. Successive shots often vary to no more than a minimal degree. Similar to a record album with a crack, the progression shifts in minute but regular ways.

Therese Schwarz represents the politician Konrad Wagner, a close friend of Paula Dennstein, who was pilloried by a newspaper for his #MeToo stigma. Therefore, the surprise visit from her little sister Marita doesn't fit into her plan at all. Especially since Marita, along with Ferdinand, has come into sensitive contact with the police due to a cannabis incident. For Konrad's defense, it's important to identify the slanderer, but it's a race against time, as the state elections are just around the corner...

Conny's newly founded "agency for solving unsolvable problems" starts with a difficult case. Conny is supposed to bring the ex-pop star Larry, who has lost his career, back to winning ways. She doesn't see the fact that he doesn't want to and that she has no idea about the music business as an obstacle. She has a real ace up her sleeve in music professional René. And as long as her beloved but morbidly jealous Freddy doesn't notice that his biggest rival is Conny's new partner, almost nothing can go wrong.

17-year-old Ria is a sensitive and mysterious young woman. Ria's mother has suffered in a car accident and has stopped speaking since her daughter's birth. The family grows deer for sale, yet, the business is not successful. To earn some money, her father decides to organize a hunt.

Director Sven-Eric Bechtolf pulls off a brilliant coup with the high aesthetics of his intrigue, a masterful parody of the "everything is possible" of our time - flanked by an ensemble of exquisite vocal talents.

The 2015 edition of the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Concert saw Zubin Mehta back on the podium after an eight year absence. Mehta has mellowed a bit in that time, and the program seems to reflect that. The orchestra plays with its usual style and finesse, though the fireworks are kept to a minimum. There's a lot of beautiful legato playing to be had here, which is enjoyable to hear when so many ensembles feel the need to punch and pull at music these days. In a word, "tradition" is on display, and that's a good thing.

The washing machine bites the dust: turning the humdrum life of a young couple upside down.

Documentary about the children of people who were incarcerated by the Nazis. Collects interviews and tells the stories of different people persecuted for various reasons.

A man runs amok.

A journey across unique places that challenge the world of their time, landmarks of the future built by revolutionary minds that can be described, each in their own way, as architectural utopias. The film is divided in five chapters which represent five works.

Morris Brown, a New York gambler acquainted more with his checkbook than his prayer book, returns to Galicia with his very American daughter, Mollie (Molly Picon) for a family wedding. But Mollie, whose exuberant antics fill the film, unexpectedly meets her match--an engaging young yeshiva scholar who forsake tradition and joins the secular world to win her heart.

What would you do if your basic income was taken care of month after month? Would you stop working? Follow your passions? Take more risks? The four-figure sum that all four members of the Wardwell family receive each year from the Alaskan government’s crude oil profits goes towards a college fund for their children, something they would otherwise be unable to afford. Filmmaker Christian Tod, himself a fervent supporter of the idea, explores the model of an unconditional basic income and takes a look at trial systems already underway in the US, Canada and Namibia. Wandering the history of this utopia reminiscent of science fiction he eventually ends up in Switzerland, where the new system was voted on in 2016. In this multifaceted and highly entertaining documentary, Tod broaches life’s existential questions and fuels the debate on one of the most prevalent economic topics of our generation.

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.

As all the world knows, Vienna is a city on the Danube.Day after day, the metropolis and its inhabitants consume roughly 370,000 cubic metres of water – hardly unusual for a city as big.It may come as a surprise that not one drop of this water is abstracted from the Danube.All water drunk, used for cooking, showering and flushing or drawn from wells, all water that enters sewers and treatment plants originates in the Alps.Crystal-clear drinking water adds glamour and brilliance to the city.How this valuable resource travels to Vienna, changing itself and the city in the process before ending up in the river, is the stuff of stories. This is the story of Vienna’s water.

Brand, an author, who falls in love with Angela, his terminally ill wife's nurse and blunders into a dangerous spiral of passion and jealousy. A vindictive husband, an insistent chief inspector, a farsighted priest and a proud wife entrap Brand in a maelstrom of persecution, destruction and obliteration which can only end in life or death. It's a quest for redemption, the force which drives us all.

It is a surprising mosaic of diverse environments and a colorful animal world... A huge lake. A world unto itself. The huge Lake Balaton was formed long ago in a world of volcanoes and ice ages. The largest inland lake in Central Europe lies in the heart of Hungary, on the plains stretching east of the Alps. Fresh water flows into it via the Zala River and a number of smaller seasonal streams. These waterways carry precious cargo to the lake. Countless fish swim here to their traditional spawning grounds. The dense local vegetation is popular with herons and cormorants; they have only one concern: to collect enough material to build their nests. So many young birds grow up here that the marshes are teeming with life. Just like the entire lake and its immediate surroundings, which are truly full of natural beauty.

When the mathematics teacher discovers a love letter from his daughter, family father Felix Schneider is suspected of having a secret lover.

The starting point is an excerpt from the Albanian feature film "Qyteti me i ri ne bote" (Xhanfise Keko 1974, EN: "The Youngest City in the World"), in which a boy dreams of a modern city where progress and change are represented by construction and sealing. The film revolves around the historical and current transformation processes of urban space and reflects on the power of images, historical and contemporary utopias, and their interplay with architecture. An essay on new and contemporary utopias and their interplay with architecture. The film revolves around the historical and current processes of transformation in urban space and reflects on the power of images, historical and contemporary utopias, and their interplay with architecture. An essay on new and old regimes, power, propaganda, and the accessibility of public space.

It is forever night and nobody knows why. Humans hide in caves and pits. Dirt and darkness are their companions. All they hear is the wind howling across the frozen wilderness. Joe does not hear the wind, though. He only hears the deafening rattling noise of his generator which provides light and life. He does not need to worry about night monsters. He has ample time to look for the solution to the mystery of eternal darkness. INTEC has something to with it, and he will find out the rest as well.

Therese lives in two worlds. As housemaid she has fallen in love with the sophisticated Countess Meta von W. As a young woman of poor/humble descent, she has to watch as her sister Magdalena is being hauled into the abyss by a devilish sectarian. Together with this notorious pastor, Thomas Pöschl, Magdalena conducts exorcisms at her community/in the village. Small children have to renounce Satan, a young woman is brutally exorcized and later proclaimed a saint by Pöschl.

About the researcher Wilhelm Reich, who wanted to prove and compare life-energies in global experiments and searched for basic principles of life. His transformation from the model student Freud to the questionable UFO researcher is also addressed.

The deceased owner of a medieval castle stipulated the following in his will: The heir to his mighty estate would be the elder of the two stepsisters, Katharina and Margrit von Kronberg, namely Margrit, if she married Heinz Wagner, a cousin who had just returned from captivity. When Margrit observed Katharina and Heinz rendezvousing at a nearby lake, Margrit demanded that her husband leave the castle immediately, before she, the elder sister, and Heinz were married. Furious, Katharina then plotted to poison Margrit. Only when Katharina dreamed that the village youth would avenge Margrit's violent death according to ancient tradition and that she, Katharina, would be burned on a pyre like witches in the Middle Ages, did she, after awakening from this nightmare, abandon her bloody plan. Her change of will is rewarded: Heinz has decided to marry Katharina and not Margrit.

Belly sinks further and further down into the depths of a mysterious underwater garden. Above water, she is bullied at school for not speaking the language and already having her period. At home, her mother gives her nothing but tough love. Down below is the only place she feels free. But before she can truly live and breathe in this dark fairy tale realm, she must grow the fins of a mermaid, which requires a very painful sacrifice.