Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

A specially designed waterwheel interacts with strobe light, synchronized with two 35mm cameras recording the scenery in stereoscope. Our perception is tricked twice in a single moment: the illusion of the moving image is created in camera, while the illusion of standstill is forced by the strobe light onto the patterns of the waterwheel.

Sleazy jazzy Exotica TripPop as luxury drowned homage to 70s Euro-Grindhouse Cinema and its famed cult directors like Jess Franco, Jean Rollin or Harry Kümel: Red plush, opium n'a serious lack of oxygen. Surrounded by bizarre costumes and rituals, seductive singer Laura Mura breaks the power of horny kingsmen and lusty leatherslaves. A final return to a storytelling narrative in videoclips, not seen since the glory days of Kate Bush. Cinematic opulence, shot in Viennas famous, recently burned down Sophiensäle, that could leave its DV origin far behind by sheer tasteful style and won international recognition, airplay and a prize.

Jonas Kaufmann's very personal tribute to the city's famous music. We see the star tenor on the move in Vienna, visiting his favorite places, from the Ferris wheel to the sausage stand. The centerpiece of the more than 100-minute documentary is the acclaimed concert at the Vienna Konzerthaus, where Jonas Kaufmann, accompanied by the Prague Philharmonic under the direction of Jochen Rieder, sang world-famous melodies from Viennese operettas and famous Viennese songs. The Viennese audience was enthusiastic, and the reviews for the concert were glowing. Interspersed with the music from the concert, we experience Jonas Kaufmann at his favorite places in Vienna, in front of the Konzerthaus, at the Naschmarkt, and in the Vienna Cemetery – sharing interesting facts and stories about Viennese music. "My Vienna" is an atmospheric declaration of love, a personal documentary full of music and stories that touch the heart and put you in a good mood.

The film captures a pivotal moment in Afghan history and offers a rare and visceral look at a ruthless sports culture where champions become marked men.

Early short horror film directed by Wilhelm Müller.

Thomas, a teenager, is searching for the meaning of his life. In the process, he meets a strange guy named Leroy. Leroy shows Thomas that there is more to him than just an ordinary teenager. He is a werewolf of the highest order.

A series of hand-drawn short animations are photographed in the hand of the artist as she travels to various locations in Vienna.

In Slovakia, behind walls built to separate the Romani ethnicity from the “white” population, babies are born in precarious conditions. In Palestine, a civilian population’s life passes in the shadow of a concrete wall eleven meters high. Beyond that wall, family, land, and jobs are left behind. In Western Sahara, in an attempt to create a safe zone, young women risk their lives removing landmines from the 3,000 kilometer strip of sand wall that separates them from their land and families. SEPARATED, through the voices of its protagonists, speaks of three peoples’ struggle to survive. Their common destiny unites them: exclusion and oblivion.

How is it like to be forced to wait while people are drowning just a few miles away? "No News" gives an insight into the absurdity of European migration policy.

A lonely vampire finally succeeds in inviting a beautiful woman into his palace for dinner. Everything develops perfectly, until she discovers that the vampire has a little defect...

In this episode, the petite artist Ayub poses in front of an oriental curtain in a voluminous wedding dress, performing a playback of Lorraine Ellison's equally voluminous voice. "Remember you said you'd always gonna need me, remember you said you'd never ever leave me." Left alone in a room with relatives in Iraq, trapped in a cultural corset, locked in a "man's world," the brat becomes a heartbreakingly ironic soul singer.

An altruistic grandmother has to push her grandson and his family to leave home and escape war.

A documentary short about Dziga Vertov.

Josef Hader takes all his programs out of the freezer and cooks a leftover meal that will surely melt in your mouth.

An easy-to-frighten teenager watches a horror movie on Halloween night and the line between reality and his imagination becomes blurred.

The longing for (false) comfort in the face of these demands is already addressed in the title of *The Ultimate Question to All Answers* (2019) to then—as a parable with no educational value, narrated by the onboard computer voice of a Flixbus to combat boredom during the ride—deliberately let it peter out into absurdity amidst the offshoots of escapism in modernity (conspiracy theories, esotericism, fixed book prices). The ironic lesson of Gülzow’s work: It is precisely in failure that resistance succeeds today.

A man gasps for breath until there is none left.

How was a castle built in the Middle Ages? With which tools, which technology? Answers to these exciting questions can be found in Friesach in Austria's southernmost province of Carinthia.

Pictures of everyday life of an old woman: During the week she waits for one event, the visit of her daughter on Sunday.

For the exhibition VILLA KARBACH (part of European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024, Austria), Siegfried A. Fruhauf (AT) developed the installation “Alpenglühen Karbach” (2024) based on rethinking cinema in new and endless ways. The Austrian artist tries to bring the sun underground and stage the sunrise in a tunnel.

AKA DBB3, DBB4, DBB30. 5h one go

Some things can be seen more clearly at night.. . A film poem about a continent at night, a culture on which the sun’s going down, though it’s hyper alert at the same time, an “Abendland” that, often somewhat self-obsessively, sees itself as the crown of human civilization, while its service economy is undergoing rapid growth in a thoroughly pragmatic way. Nikolaus Geyrhalter takes a look at a paradise with a quite diverse understanding of protection. Night work juxtaposed with oblivious evening digression, birth and death, questions that await answers in the semi-darkness, a Babel of languages, the routine of the daily news, and political negotiation: All this has been captured in images with a wealth of details that make us look at things in a new way. The longer you consider a word, the more distant is its return gaze: ABENDLAND.

In a world between sink attachments and Weight Watchers meetings, Josef feels crushed by his own weight. He doesn't even dare to go to the tango class his brother gave him as a gift to get him out of the house, for fear of public humiliation. But an unexpected encounter with the rapper Monobrother triggers something in Josef.

In a remote forest, a young deaf woman barricades herself in her van after receiving ominous photographs that reveal she’s not alone.

Tyoma, a cosplayer and TikToker from Kyiv, leaves his homeland due to being drafted into the war with Russia. In Vienna, he adapts to his new environment, aided by his ability to transform into various characters.

EXIT: OPEN is a first-person danse macabre documenting true stories and individual perspectives on dying, death and transience: filmed during the 2020 Coronavirus lockdown at an abandoned office complex in Vienna, Austria.

In I AM HERE!, Wüst gave 16mm and its limitations on shooting a try, resulting in one of his most beautiful and intense works. Little happens outside childhood friends Monika and Martin talking while walking through a forest towards a barren field and a car. Their talk is simultaneously incessant and halting as they circle a history of hurt from their younger days.

On March 28th 1981, 10.000 people take to the streets. The city of Judenburg demonstrates for the preservation of their steel plant. The demonstration is a start, a late attempt to avert the threat of job loss. The film shows how the international steel crisis affects Austria.

Egon arrives. Rather, Egon arrives late. If he had arrived on time, the situation which had made his arrival unwelcome, would not have occured. He would have been welcomed and this farce would not have been able to take place...

Blurred silhouettes, where otherwise big stars stroll, gray streaks where glamour normally reigns, iconoclasm where strict attention is usually paid to visual staging. Palmes d'or is nourished by photos that were taken at the film festival in Cannes, and is, at the same time, its most quintessential undermining.

Hannes Kähls von Kählsberg has hired himself out as a head farmhand on the estate out of love for Jutta, the beautiful young lady of the Salzerhof. Since she was widowed, Jutta has developed into a proud, domineering person who does not show Hannes the unconfessed feelings she has for him. She fights doggedly for the land of the salt mountain, which is the state salt works authority wants to dispute. Hannes urges her to give up because he thinks large parts of the underground tunnel are in danger of collapsing.

Saturation documents the movement away from handrail-heavy snow culture and brings you back to the mountains, back to the powder and back to having fun with your friends. Riders like Rice, deMarchi, Muller and Nyvelt mark the beginning of a revolution in snowboarding based on the merging of freestyle and big mountain riding.

On August 13, 1912, Franz Kafka meets Felice Bauer. In 1912 alone, Kafka sends her around 100 letters to Berlin. Five years later, at the end of a nerve-wracking and sometimes painful relationship, he throws Felice's replies into the fire. The documentary film about Kafka's literary and private life is based on his letters and diary entries.

"Stranger Than Paradise," vaguely associatively linked to Jim Jarmusch's wintery Eighties road movie, is a genuinely film-choreographed work: a hybrid, subtly futuristic chamber play for eight people and an investigative camera. Set in sunken moods and deceptive images, this dance film is an elegy that marks the transition from one species to the next. "Stranger Than Paradise" is a reflection of the systematic expansion of the human and animalistic into the mechanical and sometimes their hybrid existence. The body is obsolescent: it is still needed but the preparations for its abolition are in progress.

Rattling, diamond shaped refractions of light: a projector? fluorescent tubes? It turns out to be more like a "human machine" the filmmaker is dissecting with a fine surgical blade. And so commences an imagined dolly shot into the bloodless, post-humanoid body, travelling into an abstract space that occasionally seems to become concrete of its own accord before dissolving back into glistening streaks and ultimately, wide expanses: a cinematic worm hole leading behind the images, where the sluggish human eye is and must be subject to a trick of light arrangements.

The location of the Bohemian Forest at the former Iron Curtain and the political influences involved, had the result that both forms of country side are united here: natural landscape on the one hand and the ancient cultivated landscape on the other.

"In A MILLION IN DEBT IS NORMAL, SAYS MY GRANDFATHER, Gabriele Mathes traces the consequences of the decline of her father’s furniture factory via her family’s Super-8 footage(..)" (Viennale)

A speculative biography of Joseph Otmar Hefter, a Jewish territorialist active in the 1930's and who disappeared from public attention soon after. What begins as an investigation of Hefter's elusive life between the eastern marches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, New York, and Mexico, soons turns into questioning the biography genre - the stuff a life is made of, and the ways to make sense of it.

A man and a woman who have not seen each other for 50 years are filled with hate when they meet at their grandchildren's wedding. Layer by layer, the old couple uncovers their baneful past...

A travelling salesman attempts to cross a vast, dark forest in his old medium-range car, an Opel "Berlina". Suddenly, however, something happens... And then there is nothing.

A short film about the importance of biodiversity for the cultural identity and the economic independence of Latin America. This animated documentary is based on a conversation with the leading biodiversity expert and transgender activist Brigitte Baptiste, recorded at "Instituto Humboldt" in Bogota, the world's first institute for biodiversity research.

Two men break out of prison and go on a killing spree.

Man & Woman & Animal shows a woman finding pleasure in herself, the whole film is a kind of assertion and affirmation of female sexuality and its independence from male values and pleasures... (Joana Kiernan)

This 2004 production of Richard Strauss's three-act comic opera Der Rosenkavalier (1911) emerged from the efforts of the Grosses Festspielhaus Salzburg. It stars Adrianne Pieczonka as Feldmarschallin, Franz Hawlata as Baron Ochs, Angelika Kirchschlager as Octavian and Franz Grundheber as Faninal. The Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor and the Wiener Philharmoniker lend added musical support, with Rupert Huber serving as chorus master of the former and Semyon Bychkov conducting the latter.

J. S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio performed by the Wiltener Sängerknaben choir and soloists together with the Barockorchester Academia Jacobus Stainer and conducted by Johannes Stecher, in the Basilica of Wilten, Austria, in 2012.

Documentary about three female footballers from the Austrian football club FC Blau Weiß Linz - Union Kleinmünchen. The film portrays the athletes and their fight for recognition and equality in male-dominated football.

Ecological interdependence, co-creation, resilience and collaboration in nature – these are the topics dealt with in this documentary film, viewed against the backdrop of our increasingly threatened environment. Beyond the poles of nostalgia and techno-futurism, the film’s impressive images provide an insight into natural processes and systems. Dead forest in Central Europe is becoming living forest again. Floating beds in Bangladesh are taking on climate change. In the dunes of China’s desert regions, thousands of people are working on the largest renaturalisation project in the world. In the Danube Delta between Romania and Ukraine, old dams from the Soviet era are being dismantled so that a European wetland can once again become a biodiverse natural landscape. Nature as a role model and a potential game changer for future-oriented, innovative adaptation strategies? This film highlights some successful approaches to tackling our current ecological challenges.