Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

A family drama plays itself out in the contrasting light and shadows.

A lazy teenage couch-potato is surprised by the appearance of his time-traveling self and discovers the object responsible for it: a mystic watch.

Officially, the Wright Brothers flew first in 1903. But the Australian aviation expert John Brown argues that German born Gustave Whitehead flew in Connecticut in 1901. To display the Wright flyer, the Smithsonian Museum agreed that it will never claim that anyone flew before the Wrights. History may not be as certain as we thought.

Documentary about (s)exploitation films made in Austria

In fictional sequences inserted into this documentary about economic, social and political perspectives on possible upcoming developments, the filmmakers portray a utopian future as a foreign territory. Six public figures from various cultural and social circles reflect on the future as a matter of time, people and the world.

Casimir lives in Warsaw with his wealthy wife Catherine, but something is missing in his life until Caroline shows up. They flee to Vienna, where great obstacles await them.

On her son's birthday, 25-year-old single mother Kathi receives day release from prison and finds her three-year-old, who is living with Kathi’s unstable mother, in terrible circumstances. Kathi is forced to find a way to enable a better future for her toddler, while she is confronted with her past– and time is against her, as she has to be back in prison by 6pm.

Austrian composer Franz Léhar's opera Giuditta receives a unique interpretation by the Seefestspiele Mörbisch in this stage production, which stars Natalia Ushakova and Mehrzad Montazeri as the principal leads. The Morbisch Festival Orchestra accompanies the production, while the Chorus and Ballet of the Seefestpiele Mörbisch lend added support.

“If you speak in a low voice, no one hears you.” Two narrow alleys in Istanbul. A crowd of men, yelling. Screaming, shouting, chaotic gesticulation, grimacing faces, a deafening buzz of wild voices. The verbal noise dominates the scene. A communicative situation, incomprehensible at first to the alien bystander who doesn’t speak the language. Apparently they are traders, I find out. And they call it “the walking stock market”. But what does it really mean? “Today it’s a very quiet day. Everything is still at rest."

An experimental short film that combines video clips and animations. Characterized by fast editing and an intense audio mix consisting of screams, voices and shrill sounds, the project is an abstract image of the filmmaker's own mind.

What is the human body able to sustain when subjected to devices that record sounds and images? And what can be done with the human body when it tends to evade the representational codes of these devices? MAZY (meaning “labyrinthine”), based on the choreography by Willi Dorner, offers three answers formulated with the dispositives of video, film and computer: videographic marionette, expressive filmic being and computerized trace of movement.

Two lost souls in London. Connected through a poem in German and the question of how they will meet.

The Italian “refugee island” of Lampedusa is in the firm grip of winters tristesse. Tourists have left, the remaining refugees fight to be taken to the mainland. As a fire destroys the worn down ferry, that connects the island to Italy, the mayor Giusi Nicolini and the local fishermen struggle for a new ship. The tiny community at the edge of Europe is engaged in a desperate struggle for solidarity with those who many consider the cause of the ongoing crisis: the African boat people.

In an occupied establishment - a kind of self-defined sub-cosmos of reality - there is a sensual search for lust and fulfillment taking place. Women and men dance, desire, interact; their perfectly choreographed body game becomes a symbiotic extension of an excessively hedonistic sub- conscious. Amidst it all: a mafia boss seeks to take control of the establishment and finds the meaning of life in the process. Perfect Garden is a fabulously hypnotic film, utopian and realistic all at once

A middle-aged woman in rural dress and a young woman in a smarter dress are picking up herbs in a forest. The workload and the sunny day call for a halt for refreshment. The young girl disrobes, and enters the nearby river in the nude, followed by the mature woman who simply fathers her long skirts up to her waist, revealing her naked thighs and white-slip covered buttocks. The camera follows them to the right, capturing the water movement, and their splashing about. (A white sunflower stands alone in the midst of the water creeks - hinting at the Production company's logo, an 8-pointed star.) A fisherman arrives and starts throwing his hook at the fish, with no results; so, he moves to the right, and throws the hook again, this time capturing the heavy mature woman who comes from behind the curtain of willows, complaining of pain in the lower of her back. A policeman in city uniform and white casket appears, to expel both the fisherman and the woman from the place.

Hands vigorously pull scraps of paper from an antiquated printing press, while their owner remains invisible. Then Mimi Minus and a razor blade - the incident is still shocking. The shrouded head, wrapped in muslin, reappears, and black paint is daubed over the top ... no image retains its integrity, for each is crossed through, painted, double-exposed, spilt, soiled.

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

Documentary about the making of the 1949 film "The Third Man".

The wildlife of the tundra on Alaska's north coast is particularly threatened by climate change.

"I didn't look for the mandolin: it found me." By chance, as a child, Avi Avital discovered a passion for this modest stringed instrument, traditionally associated with popular music and amateur performances. His first teacher, a violinist by profession, inspired him to defy the limits of genre and learn to play classical music. The Israeli musician has now become the mandolin's greatest ambassador, performing sensitive arrangements of baroque pieces the world over.

Anti hero Aldus Morely fulfills his gruesome penance by night, dejected and bitter...yet never giving up on the hope that he will one day be given a sign to forgive himself.

Philippe (Many Pe) and Filippo (Many Pa) make windows. A letter and a package are dropped off. The one man is a glazier and the other works with steel and neon. Scissors/stone/paper - who wins?

It is the Friday before a long weekend; the hours of an afternoon in an unbearable hot summer. Karl, the employee, is given one last job to complete.

Kalah is an old Arabic mathematical game, played by two people with 72 stones. The film is a "mapping" of the moves of a game that ends in a draw: each stone corresponds to a sound and a colour.

Thousands of sharp jokes aimed at those in power, hundreds of personally signed petitions, countless charity performances for a wide variety of good causes, numerous charity wine auctions, and several hundred liters of beer personally consumed in support of Ute Bock's refugee aid project: Thomas Maurer's record as a do-gooder is undoubtedly impressive. Who could blame him for gradually developing a certain longing for a slower pace of life, serenity, and his own garage space in the house? Because, of course, mental space is the most important thing. But a spacious apartment also has its advantages. What could possibly be the problem?

The celebrated writer Carlo Conti, the superstar among writers for lusty and intimate stories, only wants to sleep and enjoy his inertia. Coerced by his girlfriend and lured by his agent, he nevertheless allows himself to be persuaded to take on an assignment and now he invents erotic stories and scripts taken from everyday life on a continuous basis.

Four gentlemen are talking in a beer-garden; during a short absence of one of them, who pretends to be an art lover, the others decide to make a prank on him. When he comes back, one them invites the "square" bourgeois to his home, pretexting to show him an art catalog. The men pay their drinks and leave, but the three friends convene later, and they have paid a young female model to be there, too.

In Nauruan, Anubumin means "night"—and darkness is what the fourth joint film by Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler begins with. The small and inconspicuous island of Nauru with close to 10,000 inhabitants lies in the Pacific at a great distance to the mainland. But Nauru is a tragic place steeped in history that has been overwritten by numerous narratives. The film addresses these different narratives, starting with the early exploitation of the island and its calcite and phosphate deposits by the colonial powers in the 19th century. After the golden 1970s, when the "Birdshit island" was flush with money, the phosphate was completely mined and the island state soon became insolvent. Since then, Nauru has turned into a gloomy place: 80% of the area is uninhabitable; the attempt to tap new sources of income led to the wide-scale practice of money laundering.

Short by Stefan Bohun.

A young actress dreams of getting the chance to prove herself on the big screen. Hit by rejection after rejection she finally gives up, only to put her fate into her own hands, when the director of her lastest casting gets in her taxi.

At first, all that is visible is the image of a woman’s torso, overexposed; on the sound track a rustle, crash, and voices. Ultimately, the picture of a woman – the artist herself – takes shape, a voice begins, but the woman does not move her lips, gazing steadfastly into the camera.

Irma arrives at her 18th birthday in a reform school.

Its summer and Yasmin spends her days at her family’s house in the countryside. Together with her boyfriend and his children, she goes on trips to the lake, life seems carefree. But it soon becomes clear that tensions are smoldering under the shimmering summer heat: what begins as an atmospherically narrated family drama, increasingly slides into the surreal.

Herbert and Rosa Felsen meet at their lawyer's office to take possession of an inheritance. Herbert is expecting to receive the lion's share, but after greetings are sent from beyond the grave, Rosa receives the key to a safe...

A filmmaker from Austria experiences in a refugee camp in Serbia first hand the distress, anxiety but also hope of a group of refugees from Syria and their longing for a better life in Europe.

A film about everyday life on Matuku, a small island in the Fiji archipelago. The first part of a trilogy about Fiji, "Seven Scenes of Plenty" offers insight into the rural economy and social structure as well as into the economical obstacles which the inhabitants are confronted with nowadays.

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

What images do we associate with abortion and why? Where do these images and the emotional scripts in our head come from? How do they influence women who (want to) have an abortion, how do they shape the general discussion? Franzis Kabisch’s personal desktop documentary investigates these questions with great precision, clarity and humour (yes, humour, too!).

How does one trigger a revolution? In the Romanian uprising in 1989, everything seemed to happen by itself. The people were fed up and were plagued by poverty and terror. There comes a time when action must be taken! But, it turns out that history is not that simple, as this investigative documentary proves. The film is a thorough and revealing reconstruction of the events leading up to Ceaucescu’s downfall and execution. In actual fact, the Romanian revolution was a strictly managed operation, controlled from the outside. Hungary, Germany and especially America had big fingers in the pie.

Kerstin hires a mysterious young man via the darknet to eliminate her husband Torben. But the supposed hitman Söder is really just a pretentious couch potato. Convinced that he is man enough to carry out the deed, he orders a pistol on the Darknet. When it is not delivered on time, he has to improvise.

Visual patterns are tied up in hierarchical behaviour that restrains the full potential and mobility of each individual element until the matrix collapses.