Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

Gabriele Haring and Josef Broukal guide you through cyberspace in a virtual studio, where they meet numerous Austrian experts and internet pioneers.

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.

Phaidros is based on Plato's eponymous dialogue and plays in an LBQT+ milieu of a present-day metropolis. The actor Emil is meant to embody the character of the poet Phaedrus in a battle of words with Werner Maria, who slips into the role of Socrates. When the borders between friendship and sexual initiation soon blur beyond the events on stage, too, the shrill, carnivalesque scenario turns into grotesque love triangles and quadrangles, which ultimately even cause a casualty.

The target of Tabula Rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in Tabula Rasa. At the beginning we can recognize only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera is located in front of the object. Tabula Rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, in so far literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our gaze.

Chronicles the adventurous life of Hungarian-born Jewish lawyer Benjamin Ferencz, who fled to the USA as a child and later became chief war crime prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1949 and one of the founding members of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002.

Mimi Minus, the star, advertises a new, sticky, black, brain-cleaning agent. She uses it first on her reflection in a mirror in order to clean one half of her brain and subsequently applies it to her whole body...

A film portrait of Schönbrunn Zoo, a modern zoo that represents the radical change in the relationship between humans and animals like no other.

Klaus is one of the numerous drug addicts in Austria. His story (parents are separated and he is isolated) is made more realistic with interviews. Not only do the therapists of the drug units at Mödling and Enns, the physicians and politicians who are confronted with these social problems have their say, but also the man on the street who expresses the "voice of the people" - and many other drug addicts.

Dive deep into the story of freestyle skiing, its origins, and how it continues to develop. In the fluid style of a top-to-bottom run that reaches across eras, take a thrilling ride through history.

A teenager, Christina, loses her friends in the forest. Looking for them she finds the bodies of three drowned kids on the shore of a lagoon. On summer holiday, deep in the woods, three kids, cousins, are playing around a lake when they find a drowned young woman drifting in the water. Games, lies and rituals unfolding into a circular time in which death loses its ultimacy. What is real and what is a mirage? Who is dreaming and who is being dreamed?

Johann Lurf‘s film Endeavour slides between documentary, avant-garde film, and science-fiction. This highly singular combination of materials and techniques gives the viewer of Endeavour a feeling of flight, as the film continually evades the gravity of genres and definitive definitions. Lurf uses NASA footage from a day and a night launch of the space-shuttle that follows the booster rockets from take-off to splashdown.

A triple suicide derails the life of many people.

How does dating and finding love work in an era where partnership has been radically redefined? All people share the yearning to connect and belong with others and the hope of experiencing genuine intimacy. Our three protagonists Sarah (Austria), Johanna (Germany) and Sampsa (Finland) search for love in very different ways and show that having faith in the most unusual of methods can open up undreamed of opportunities.

Anti-war movie in the true sense of the word, searching for possibilities for peace in the most unlikely place of an online war game. It’s a tribute to disobedience and desertion — in both digital and physical-real warfare. Shot in the picturesque war landscapes of «Battlefield V», the hyperreal graphics become the backdrop for an essay-like narrative. The film revolves around the history of deserters — a part of human history, which has hardly been illuminated. Performances and creative interventions explore the scopes and limits of the audiovisual entertainment machine.

When single mother Kathi learns that her father is becoming increasingly neglected and in need of care, she returns to her old home after a long time.

A group of young people enter a deserted house for a party. One by one they get brutally murdered by two Killers.

Based on several medieval mystery plays, including the late 15th-century English morality play "Everyman". The premise is that the good and evil deeds of one's life will be tallied by God after death, as in a ledger book. The drama is the allegorical accounting of the life of Everyman, who represents all mankind.

Based on material that emerged during the occupation of the arena in the summer of 1976, the film shows the organization of collective work, the negotiations with the city and community and finally the demolition of the buildings.

Everyone can see that the Slupetzkis live in luxury. What their neighbors, the Taubers, don't see is that they are broke. So the Slupetzkis only pretend to go on their ostentatiously announced prestigious vacation and instead hide in their villa. But there's something they don't know: their daughter Diana is using the seemingly empty house to spend the holidays with her new boyfriend, Tomek, an Eastern European car mechanic, doing whatever she wants. Unfortunately for Diana's parents, there's nothing they can do about their daughter's plans, because otherwise their cover would be blown.

Darkness and its possession evoke artistic "pre-images": primarily Expressionism and its "after-images". The story is told of a stroll through the (cinematic) night, of absurd and of dead theater.

This movie consists of 100 frames. The length of 100 frames an analog 35 mm film is 6.25 feet = 1.91 meter. Keep other people at this comfortable distance. COVID-19 is bad! Stay safe!

A fleeting acquaintance can be exciting, adventurous, funny, but also opaque or even threatening. Shot in a single shot, "Between The Lines" explores the nuances of such a situation. Between the tracks of an underground station, the outlines of two people and their stories slowly emerge.

Showcases a Manhattan apartment and the city from its window.

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.

This mountain region that reaches across several countries in Eastern Europe is the home to gold diggers, wizards, cow herders and old Hassids.

Presents moving images of society’s outsiders, the impoverished and oppressed, whose lives are contrasted with the opulent surroundings of contemporary Vienna.

“WAGERL” takes a humorous look at the controversial shopping carts in Vienna’s Großfeldsiedlung, which not only shape the parks, residential buildings, and streets but also cause a lot of trouble.

Short film by Daniela Zahlner.

White-painted wooden beams are joined together into building-like structures that glide across the image in slow and steady rotational movements. Static shots are spliced together and accompanied by harmonious sine tones, which rise and fall in sync with the incidence of light.

A documentary on the 1964 Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria.

Grossglockner is Austria’s highest peak and the eastern Alps’ most impressive summit. Rising to a height of almost 3900 meters, the ‘BLACK MOUNTAIN’ towers over an Alpine natural paradise, the Hohe Tauern National Park, where ibex and chamoix roam the cliffs, wild flowers grow in amazing profusion and golden eagles soar above the valleys.Georg Riha presents dizzying perspectives of the glaciers, sheer cliffs and steep ravines that shape the face of this rocky giant and continue to attract and challenge a steady stream of mountaineers.

"What could I tell you about the world I live in?" Addressing her unborn child, the narrator tries to find answers partly through claustrophobic pictures interwoven with intimate notes on a pregnancy in times of a pandemic. Based on a childhood memory, the experimental short film spans from the Cold War Iron Curtain, to the so-called “refugee crisis” and the renewed closing of borders during COVID-19. Textures of walls closing in, blur with pixelated maps, creating a subjective portrait of a new reality and its digital image-world.

What’s it like to live with vision loss, knowing that someday soon you’ll never be able to see the faces of those you love again? This film is a survey of the lives of people living with visual impairments who have either already gone completely blind or are slowly losing sight of the world around them, but still do not give up in their pursuit of happiness and a life of positivity.

Darko, Milenko and Goran, Serb taxi drivers in Vienna, want to lead happy working-class lives. After the government raises taxes on mostly immigrant taxi drivers, they attempt to prosper through the machinations of the tarot reader Vladica.

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.

Father and daughter drive to his mother's house on the countryside to bring private items to the hospital after her apoplexy. The father gets confronted with the fear of losing his mother. The daughter observes this realization through children's eyes.

The director chronicles his last trip to Japan with his girl friend (Yukika Kudo), an attempt at Eastern and Western observations.

Manfred Deix is a cartoonist an painter. Above all, his aggressive caricatures of politicians and political events in the Austrian provinces have made him notoriously famous far beyond national borders. His very personal chronicles of current events and portrayals of human calamities (Deix's people are generally obese and disproportionate) are also the contents of four books which are bestsellers. This documentary film of Peter Hajek describes the career and work of the Austrian, not only at work but among his numerous cats which, apart from his wife, mean very much to him.

In the Gruen Effect, an architect's life, work and critical humor become a means to make sense of the cities we live in today. The Viennese architect Victor Gruen is considered the father of the shopping mall and the pedestrian zone. His ideas about urban planning, both influential and abused, have led to cities that serve the new gods of consumption. By tracing Victor Gruen’s path from prewar Vienna to fifties America and back to Europe in 1968, the documentary explores the themes and translation errors that have come to define urban life.

Winifred, the geriatric daughter-in-law of the famed composer Richard Wagner, talks about her cultural and political influence during the Third Reich. Yet in contradiction to the films's title, Winifred confesses nothing. The contradictions within her discourse do, however, reveal the extent of her delusions and political commitment as an unrepentant fascist. She paradoxically describes herself as a completely apolitical being, adamant that her classification as a grade three Nazi at the end of the war was a grave injustice. Still Winifred cannot contain her amusement when she recalls that after the collapse of the Third Reich, she was the only person left in Germany who would admit that she was a Nazi.

When Tchaikovsky premiered his famous ballet The Nutcracker in Saint Petersburg 130 years ago, it was presented as a double bill, as standard at the time, together with the opera Iolanta. The Volksoper Wien, being part home to the famous Wiener Staatsballett, under the helm of the new artistic director Lotte de Beer and music director Omer Meir Wellber presents both works again in one evening, but not as two separate pieces, but by fusing the two works into one.

It is autumn. An area of villas in the outkirts of the city. A dilapidated villa in an overgrown garden. The three Schwarz sisters live there. They make life miserable for themselves by constantly harassing each other. They can't live together but they can't get away from each other. Their father has been dead for a long time, but his spirit is omnipresent. One day a letter arrives and the uneventful lives of the sisters are thrown into confusion.

Maya suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and finds herself at "Am Himmel" in Vienna. She is not dead, she is in Vienna. It is night. She checks out her body. What is she missing?

In his essayistic documentary Sigmund Steiner investigates the work, lives and generational relations of three Austrian farmers. Even though none of them are his father, each one of the film's protagonists reflects on one aspect of Steiner's complicated father-son relationship.

"Action" by Günter Brus. At first Kren did not want to show the film, because the image is underexposed. A copy of the negative material turned out to be better than the original material and so Kren did show the film. The film's title relates to Brus' use of silver paper for his action.

A new home, a promotion, a loving partner. Anna has everything she could wish for, and yet, the gradual inevitability of things begins to create a pressure within her that she can no longer bear. But where does Anna escape to when her life seems pretty much complete? Into housing complexes that swallow their residents like a beehive? Into labyrinthine furniture stores filled with endless room displays? Or into the life of a missing woman who looks just like her and works at an IKEA store?

A little leopard born without spots faces the challenge of fitting in. In the end he learns to accept himself just the way he is.

This documentary delves into the growing popularity of veganism, the drawbacks of forgoing animal products, and responsible approaches to the diet.

The anarchist Luigi Lucheni plans to assassinate the Austrian empress Elisabeth. Upon meeting her, he senses their emotional connection. His determination starts to falter. Grateful for their encounter, Elisabeth encourages him in his actions.

Vienna – "I am a light-hearted creature, a child with a thousand whims": this is how the allegorical title character introduces herself in Ferdinand Raimund's magical play "Die gefesselte Phantasie" (The Bound Imagination). The Raimundspiele Gutenstein theater company has put the play on its summer program. The production was presented at a press conference in Vienna on Wednesday. Ernst Wolfram Marboe, artistic director and director of the Raimundspiele, promised a production in keeping with previous tradition: "We are building on positive experiences." The witty motto for the next season: "Broad and clever – Raimundzeit!" The acting ensemble consists mainly of performers from previous years. It was emphasized that the bare-breasted lady on the cover of the brochure is not the leading actress Rita Nikodim.

A woman on a meadow, strolling around, narcisstically involved, wandering. Now and again one can see her breasts through her half-opened shirt. The camera films with a powerful telephoto lens. This idyll is radically destroyed when the woman suddenly looks directly into the camera. There is an immediate cut (the voyeur has been discovered) and the whole sequence of events begins from the beginning again, but each time re-filmed from the last till finally, only a completely abstract, flickering picture remains.