Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

A short film about coffee, reading emails and homework.

‘Some memories – are stronger – than others.’ With this motto, Lotte Schreiber begins her experimental documentary short film Some Memories, in which she takes a look behind the scenes of the Historijski Muzej Bosne i Hercegovine, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, located in Sarajevo.

An ethnological experiment forces a group of students to live for two weeks isolated from civilization in a Germanic village without electricity or gas.

In the eighties, Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role, that of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar of exploitation films later became Wolf’s political praxis: She went to fight alongside the PKK in the Kurdish regions between Turkey and northern Iraq, where she was killed in 1998. Now honoured by Kurds as an “immortal revolutionary,” her portrait is carried at demonstrations.

Romeo and Juliet in the microcosm of the human body... Forbidden love between the young Bacterium Micromeo and Antibody-girl Globia threatens the harmony of the immune system, leading to war between ambitious leaders, and finally awakening a genetic monster that is ready to exterminate them all. "Love is stronger than dirt!"

A comprehensive documentation of new art movements from 1945 to the present day. Beginning with the "Internationale Situationniste," "Cobra," "Spur," and "Wiener Gruppe" groups in Europe, and moving on to the international Happening and Fluxus movements, including the Viennese Actionists, and from 1970 onward to international Body and Performance Art, which also encompassed media art—film and video—the documentary presents film and photographic material from these art movements.

A young woman spends a lot of time in a house. She is usually alone, sometimes she chats on the phone, she rarely receives visits: a buddy with her boyfriend, a potential boyfriend, wannabe candidates for a room to rent. Until the right roommate arrives…

Janáček's three-act opera Katya Kabanova, staged by Barrie Kosky and staged at the Felsenreitschule by Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša with an international cast of soloists, was performed on August 7 at the 2022 Salzburg Festival. The opera is based on the play The Storm by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. Set in a small Russian town, the story revolves around Káta, who is trapped in a loveless marriage to an abusive man named Boris. When she meets and falls in love with a young man named Vána Kudrjáš, she finally experiences happiness and passion. But their relationship is short-lived, as Boris finds out and forces Káta to confess her infidelity in front of the entire town. The opera explores themes of social conformity, oppression, and the consequences of forbidden love. Stage director Barrie Kosky creates an intimate but impressive setting in the magnificent Felsenreitschule.

Portrait of a great lady based on the real life of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, an Austrian architect, who joined the resistance movement against Hitler.

Documentary film portraying the Austrian artist Paul Flora.

Short documentary about working class children in Vienna during the time of the First Austrian Republic.

A story about a group of Austria-Hungarian soldiers in the 1st World War. They hold an artillery post in the mountains on the southern front to Italy. The group is cut off from their own troops and under heavy artillery fire from the Italian. When the post receives a fatal direct hit from a shell, killing the comrades, private Jacob Lindner and the seriously injured captain Jan Kopetzky are the only survivors of the post. Jakob has to suffer the madness of this hellish war in all its human atrocities. Without care, help from the command, food and water, to survive becomes an existential challenge. The young soldier tries desperately with humanity and dignity to save his and the injured captains life.

Brute Force explores how our knowledge-making practices affect the world. Drawing on quantum theory and geology, the film exposes the intrinsic omissions, distortions, and ecological impacts of image production and data extraction. From the interference patterns of neutrons to data centres and salt lakes, the film captures how our world's complexity collides with the simplified rationalities of the digital age.

Iwan Rabcynski, born in St. Petersburg (Florida), writes Russian melodramas under the pseudonym "John F. Romanoff. He gets his inspiration in Brooklyn, his chosen home. His new novel, which is meant to be autobiographical, begins with his Russian great grandfather in St. Petersburg in 1882 and follows three generations as they survive the country's political upheavals.

Based on Joseph Roth's novella.

Ten episodes tell the stories of ten encounters involving a male hooker, an actor, a cleaning lady, a female theater director, a male kindergarten teacher, a poetess, a publisher, a woman, who is a lawyer, a male puppeteer and a female make-up artist. The whole circle is triggered by the off-chance meeting of the poetess and the puppeteer on an overnight bus to Vienna, where the puppeteer succeeds in persuading the poetess to stay for a day in Vienna. All the encounters take place in one day and after 24 hours they meet again, but their lives have changed.

A love letter to Vienna in the 1960s, and simultaneously a genre film of Austrian postwar history. Viennese folk song singers Kurt Girk and Alois Schmutzer talk about their lives in the Viennese underworld – for which they endured long jail sentences.

The true story of a young female soldier who comes of age during the Eritrean civil war.

The young musicologist Mr. Fitzthum visits Mr. Szabo in his flat in order to get back an important sheet of music. He finds a man sitting in a countless number of documents and papers dealing with his collapsed idea of life.

Christina Lammer explores the gestures of surgeons. This highly collaborative work is embedded in the arts based research project Performing Surgery (2015-2018) that she realizes at Medical University Vienna, Austria. A movie camera, either a digital or an analogue 16mm Bolex, is her constant research companion.

A previously unreleased film that documents the relationship between Bacigalupo and the American poet who introduced him to the underground scene. “Filmed in Venice during the production of a documentary by Bayerischer Rundfunk, in which I participated as a consultant.” - M. Bacigalupo

Critical crime movie about a young, idealistic television reporter who is a loser in a world of cynicism and economic pressure.

"The art of the stage actor and even of a stage director is evanescent. Nothing remains of it but a 'still' photograph or two (...) Not everyone can be a genius. Somebody has to be a Leon Askin - and that's me." Leon Askin, born in Vienna in 1907 , fled from the Nazis to the USA in 1940. The private Leon Askin is portrayed: his daily routine, his contact with those around him, at work. During quiet moments, he discusses his thoughts about persecution, emigration, work, discipline, success, the image one projects to the world, his identity as a Jew, loneliness, the struggle for recognition and health, life acting - and also about death.

Forty kilometers from Verona, at the southernmost tip of the Alps, lies the hamlet of Giazza. Here live the last representatives of a Germanic language and culture originating in the 13th century: the so-called Cimbri. Industrialization and modern means of traffic and communication have almost eradicated this community. These people have thus become a symbol of all that has been lost for good.

When Muxe, a Two Spirit Indio, is invited to Europe to attend an ethnological exhibition he falls head over heels in love with Gonzo, a member of a provincial rock band. The two men become entangled in a turbulent adventure involving Cloud People and an ancient clay vase that is reputed to contain a secret message. But before they can overcome the barriers that their different cultures present and confess their love to each other they have a mystery to solve. A secret that once revealed has the power to change life on Earth forever.

A cinema verite peek at expose of the rising homophobic climate inside Russia as seen through the eyes of two young Russian lesbian activists, Olya and her girlfriend Galiya, who struggle to balance their passion for LGBTQ rights with their personal dream of having a baby together. Russian filmmaker Kirill Sakharnov’s documentary is a current look inside the Russian queer community.

The broker Erich arrives with his prostitute at an apartment, already populated by three men. Abusive games, dancing and flirting occur. Things eventually degenerates completely.

In her desperate search for sleep seventeen-year-old Eva does everything to stay the night at other people’s houses where she watches others while sleeping. When being awake through the nights, Eva takes us to the backside of normal life at the same time forcing her family and friends to develop a different perspective on what they thought is „normal“.

Anna is on her way home; waiting for the last bus. But someone's waiting with her. The streets are quiet. Too quiet. Her heart is beating loudly.

Sabaudia in Italy, created by Mussolini’s architects as a model “new fascist city”, was supplied with extensive farm lands converted from marshes. Yet, despite its undeniably “brutal” architecture, creators including Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini subsequently found Sabaudia to be a wonderful, hospitable place – the sign of a genuine, traditional Italy, and its resistance to all modern ideologies. Lotte Schreiber constructs a multi-faceted, documentary view of Sabaudia, inspired by but going beyond Pasolini, portraying it as a paradoxical mixture of social class separation, nostalgia, and everyday whimsy. (Adrian Martin)

Documentation on the life and work of Johann Nestroy from 1801 to 1862.

In 2008 and 2009, Clarissa Thieme travelled through Bosnia-Herzegovina, setting up her camera at places where war crimes took place during the nineties. Now she returns to the same locations a decade later: what traces are left behind by a violent past?

In the sixth great mass mortality of the earth, humankind became extinct. Their technology had recently progressed so far as to deconstruct the algorithms of evolution and allow artificial life to develop on Earth.

It is an everyday sight and a situation that we may be familiar with: a passage that is too small, an engine that dies or a distance that is fatally underestimated in the car.

A farmer opposes his daughter marrying a young music teacher (who a visitor from town also has eyes on) and prefers she marry a rich shopkeeper.The drama culminates with a fire in a barn where the touring Vienna Boys Choir are rehearsing.

An enlightened response to Austria's breathless cinema, a cinematic ricochet with trance flavour enhancers. Cinema which evidently appears to come from a completely different world precisely because its manner of dealing with this world is so uncompromising.

The film offers an insight into a nearly forgotten world. The times when the Sahrawi war of independence was on the international agenda seem to be long forgotten. The fate of hundreds of thousands Sahrawis living in refugee camps since the 1970s seems not to be spectacular enough for further attention. Inthe film the women get a chance to speak. It is a film about their experiences and hopes. It is mainly a film about life in surroundings where seemingly normal things are real challenges. The film is a simple and impressive portrait of women, who have been fighting against their fate to help their people. They have never lost their drive, no matter how unfavourable the circumstances have been. It reminds us of the fate of the Sahrawi people. The film is realistic, without any kitsch elements. It shows impressive pictures of the real lives of strong women, who have never stopped fighting for independence.

Brigitte Weich’s Hana, dul, sed … dives into a completely alien culture to tell the relatable story of four great young female soccer players on the world-class team from North Korea. Sabine Marte’s FINALE is a martial-arts workout of a unique kind.

Somewhere in America, some time in the thirties, a gangster is fighting for his life, an Italian is fighting for his money, and an Asian is fighting for recognition. Raw fish and seaweed, and Lizzy in the midst of it all...

Apocalypse series such as "Fear the Walking Dead" have shown us all too distressingly that, in the face of the apocalypse, stockpiling may secure your own supplies in the short term, but in no way offers protection against the actual threat. And an end-time classic like “Contagion“ already preached ten years ago that hand hygiene and face masks are essential if a global pandemic is to be contained. In "Fiction for Future", we ask old masters of the genre such as Roland Emmerich, Terry Gilliam and Frank Schätzing what the nightmarish tales of doom tell us about the horrors of our future. How will global challenges such as climate change and pandemics change our lives? Can we master the major challenges of our future? And if so, how?

The abstruse title "Wk=mMv2/2" is the physical equation for a molecule's kinetic energy, and it refers to the images shown in the film: They were created by zooming at coincidentally photographed individuals on postcards. As a result of the extreme enlargement, the grid of the cards' printing is made clearly visible and the figures, many of which are only a few millimeters high in the original, are greatly abstracted.

A man driving home receives an unexpected phone call, which initiates a series of events that pose a threat to his carefully nurtured life.

A small state in the Persian Gulf, sitting on significant natural gas deposits and bordered by the hottest sea on the planet, Qatar is one of the driest countries in the world. Its seemingly hostile landscapes, devoid of shade and water, are nevertheless home to many champions of adaptation, such as the sandfish, a small lizard, and the desert jerboa, with its disproportionately long legs. The underwater world is also attracting the attention of scientists: it is home to species of coral that are particularly resistant to heat, as well as pearl mussels. After contributing to the emirate's prosperity, these mussels could now improve the water quality of the Persian Gulf thanks to their extraordinary filtration capacity.

Conductor Peter moves into a new apartment, but two musical worlds collide: Rich bass sounds boom from the apartment next door. The neighbor seems unresponsive to his interventions – until he realizes that Lina is a deaf dancer. Misunderstandings fuel the conflict. Will they find a common language?

Somewhere in a subtropical country white visitors crowd around dark-skinned plantation workers emptying their harvest baskets. They look curious, as if wanting to test the quality of the tea leaves. Everywhere tourists take out their cameras ­ whether in front of large animals in the wild or camel riders, whether in the face of decorated human bodies or daily work routines. Now and again they look into the camera themselves. For later, for when they will proudly show their 'exotic' finds at home. This posing contains a model of western travels and picture making which is over a century old. The fascinated gaze on the foreigners fixes them in pre-formed frames. Lisl Ponger follows the trail of that gaze by taking amateur found footage material and linking it together in new ways.