Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

Oral witnesses tell about their work in the Austrian underground movement against the national socialist regime. Agnes Primoschitz, Johanna Sadolschek-Zala, Rosl Grossmann-Breuer and Anni Haider talk about helping concenreation camp prisoners escape, fighting with the partisans and imprisonment, and about various experiences which bring back happy and sad memories. Many of their friends and relatives did not survive the terrible time. Some of the oral witnesses hadn't counted on surviving the prisons and concentration camps.

Walter Harrer, an engineer, is on the night shift and returns home in the morning to find his wife lying unsconscious in the garden. She is sent to hospital were a loss of memory is observed. Dr. Bogner, a young psychiatrist, is interested in the case and tries to help Mercedes. He talks to her husband, her former lover and her friends to see if he can get some clue as to why she can't remember who she is. She confesses that she killed Lona Logan, her rival. But Dr. Bogner isn't sure that she's telling the truth. Did she really do it or is it pure fantasy?

The film is a garden full of flowers and plant leaves. They’re placed in the mouth and down inside the dress neckline; they’re danced with and set in motion. They become overlong toenails or breasts that are gently caressed or maliciously squeezed. All of this goes on accompanied by both classical music and punk. In the end, they wilt.

Early Curtiz feature

Made out of Found Footage 16 mm Material “Broken time” follows the tradition of Hand Made Film and layering of Film and Material. It is a cinematic process of a Collage, a layering of Picture elements to generate a cinematic complex.

cel animation, repetition, and disappearance... color, sound, 5:20 loop, 2015

Initially produced as looped 16mm miniatures presented on custom projectors, Philipp Fleischmann’s dazzling Film Sculptures are a suite of formal experiments exploring queer sensibilities and different states of visibility.

A land surveyor lives in his own ordered world, until one day he allows himself to become aware of something which his measuring instruments do not enable him to comprehend further. Searching for a principle of order which will embrace his new experiences, he encounters new spheres of existence...

Construction workers' meeting on Sunday afternoon. Wolfgang says how, Carsten does it and Puppy watches.

As visitors flock to South Africa to see leopards in their natural habitat, luxury tourism and boomtowns pop up around Kruger National Park.

Documentation about the 30th edition of the Vienna "Donauinselfest".

Every year over a million tourists drive up the Grossglockner road, a major feat of engineering high up in the Alps, in order to gaze in amazement at the contrast between nature and technology, a fact that causes no less amazement to the people who live there. This documentary takes a look behind the picture-book facade of the mountain scenery around the alpine village of Heiligenblut, showing the encounter between the tourists and the people who keep the place going underneath all the holiday euphoria.

Karl Prantl, the main character in the film, is one of the leading figures of Austrian art. As a sculptor - as one who shapes stones - he has produced an oeuvre of rare consistency and coherence, created out of an awareness of the fundamental concerns and utterances of man.

Tx-transform is a new film technique that transposes the time axis (t) and the space axis (x) with one another in film. Normally, each individual frame of film depicts the entire space but only a moment in time (1/24 second). With tx-transformed films, it is just the opposite: each frame shows the entire time but only a tiny portion of space (the left side of the picture is "before", the right side is "after"). —Virgil Widrich

Recomposing teeth gestures.

We spend the majority of our lives in a kind of hibernation, functional but separate from the source of our being. What can we do to wake up? Catharina Roland explores this crucial question, inviting us to share in her deeply enriching journey to discover how we can be whole again, how we can heal ourselves and the environment we live in, and how we can leave the cocoons of our perception to face our own selfishness and fears. Through lessons from visionaries and spiritual teachers as well as numerous exercises, Awake in the Dream gives us the tools to break down the walls of the person we have created for ourselves. Complete the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly. Tap into the potential that has existed since the beginning of time, and wake up to the wholeness that awaits each and every one of us.

Beavers traces John Ruskin’s legacy from London to the Alps and especially Venice, where the camera lingers on stone and water in dialogue with Ruskin’s writings. Turning pages and images of Unto This Last evoke the critic’s enduring perceptions and political vision, preserved through acts of reading.

After growing up as a girl and being celebrated as a women's downhill skiing champion, Erika Schinegger's career came to an abrupt end in 1967 after a sex test. Against the wishes of her family and the national skiing association, Erik started learning to be a man at the age of 20.

An estranged couple must overcome their relationship problems when they suddenly find themselves chased by the initiator of an evil perfume conspiracy.

Short film about presents.

The experimental short negotiates the conventions of the invisible camera. In a bare room without windows or doors, someone puts up a futile against the steady gaze of a bodiless camera. The camera evades the protagonist´s physical attacks by changing positions by means and hard cuts.

A documentary look behind the scenes at dubbing voices and sound effects. A scene is filmed and then copied three times with different sound effects and dialogues, thereby telling thre different stories.

Games with muscles, games with power, SM games. The naked body employed as a prop. Perceptions of one's own body are the focus of Body-building, and it leaves the good-girl role far behind, sometimes in striking poses, sometimes in martial dress.

A documentary film on the taboo subject of Aids. In the foreground stand five people whose lives have been taken many different directions because of Aids. They tell of the experiences which they or others have had with the disease. The "topic" is not the important thing, rather the situation in which the environment confronts one with resistance - often enough in the form of negative experiences - rather than mysteries. These experiences do not require definition or inclusion in a discussion which demands distance between the way of considering and the concept of the disease.

Retracing the trip to Tunisia that painter Paul Klee took in 1914, Tunisian filmmaker and painter Nacer Khemir leads viewers on a journey of discovery into Arabian culture.

The unique Düringer humor is brought back to life in an evening of superlatives. The hall can't stop laughing, as one joke follows another when Robert Dürflinger unleashes his Düringer humor on the audience. Especially in times like these, it's important that we distract ourselves. Who has anything to laugh about these days? A colorful evening spanning the work of the great Düringer can help.

The Children of the Noon deals with the universal subject of life. Daily activities mark the passage of time for the children and teenagers in the orphanage in the small Kenyan village of Nchiru. It soon emerges that the fact they are orphans and the genteel poverty they share are not the only problems that unite them and determine their days. A sudden death of one of them breaks the narrative rhythm and changes all points of view, intertwining a dense web of pains and joys, friendships and hopes.

Bus driver Stefan finds a bag containing 32,000 euros at the end of his shift. He decides to hand the money over to the police, but on his way there, he’s forced to confront his own problems. The longer he carries the bag with him, the deeper he sinks into an inner conflict.

“Getting married, starting a family, growing old together. What constitutes a perfect life and how do ideas, longings and desires meet a consumer-oriented society that is always striving for better? The artistic documentary accompanies Julia and Xava at sales fairs on the topics of marriage, baby, pet and age. Between offers such as mommy fitness classes, the perfect wedding pictures or the smartly designed family SUV, they deal with role and gender images and the expectations that come along with them. WE WANT MORE IN THE LAND OF UNICORNS is the narrative of a journey that invites the audience together with the filmmakers to reflect on gender roles, perfection, competition, the good life and what it takes.”

In the old city of Vienna, a young rebellious girl discovers, that she is part of a new species named: Cell reader. Knowing that she is half human half Cell reader, she is forced to choose a side.

Marko Doringer’s life is marked by recurring depressions. The filmmaker asks what expectations he wants to and can have of happiness under these circumstances and looks to his partner, longtime friends, former places of longing, and his parents’ house for answers. The result of this search is an intimate documentary about the complex interplay and opposition of family, masculinity, care, responsibility, and fragility.

"Housekeeping" is about hotel rooms, how they are used fleetingly by guests, and about those who have been cleaning the same rooms for years. The way in which each room is occupied individually stands in contrast to the chamber maids' daily experience of cleaning countless rooms, all of them identical in design and appearance. In a field of tension between the chamber maids' work and their knowledge of the short-term inhabitants of the rooms the film visualizes an aspect of daily life which is often experienced but rarely reflected.

The Big Jump is an adventurous journey into the world of ski flying and this high-tech sport is shown in spectacular 3D.

One can determine a line in Tscherkassky’s oeuvre which turns around a game with filmic presentation, with degrees of recognisability — with the only-just and the not-any-more. Just to see desire. An example of this is Erotique. One sees swirling pictures, parts of a woman’s face, red lips, eyes in cyclical fragments of movement. Often it is difficult to tell which part of the body one actually sees (whoever wants to can see/imagine/think sexual organs and sexual acts.) The gaze gets hung up on partial objects, no integral, whole body to think about. No body, whose representation was always one of the problems in cinema.

artist highlights self-care and masculinity from an artistic and documentary perspective. The film celebrates images of togetherness, care and sensitivity at the Mr. Artist Barbershop in Vienna. Filmed by hand, the camera stays close to the protagonists. The body rhythm of the filmmaker is written into and onto the film exposures and converses with the experienced hand gestures of the barbers. Through craft and artistic expression, two forms of work enter into a sensual and transformative dialogue with each other. The analogue, warmly coloured and abstracted 16mm exposures are interwoven with an immersive and nuanced sound space composed by musician Rojin Sharafi.

Children who are stillborn or die too young - not an uncommon fate. But society hardly ever talks about it. This film gives parents a space to grieve and break the silence.

The women in Frauen von G. sew in piecework.

Feature film by Gustav Ucicky

Prisoners working outdoors clash when one, Mark, is violently beaten after merely asking for water.

At the Salzburg Festival 2024, the Mozarteum Orchestra conducted by the Spanish maestro Roberto Gonzalez-Monjas presented a morning dedicated to Mozart by the American soprano Emily Pogorelc.

Because the fortress of the Alps stands in the path of atmospheric depressions and air masses, it exerts a decisive influence on Europe's climate. Understanding the meteorological workings of this mineral theater of spectacular phenomena is therefore an essential challenge for scientists seeking to unlock its secrets. And it's a matter of urgency: in mountain areas, climate change is multiplying the challenges and increasing the danger for the population. In the mountains, temperatures are rising twice as fast as on the plains, and cold spells are becoming shorter and shorter. As a result, glaciers are melting, leading to avalanches and landslides that can destroy entire valleys.

Parks are not only recreational areas for us humans, but also valuable habitats for animals and plants. These green oases make cities worth living in and provide a surprising wealth of species. Parks are often our quickest contact with nature and a great opportunity to get to know wild animals. This film shows typical and well-known park inhabitants from a new perspective. In interviews, experts introduce us to the unknown sides of crows, squirrels and the like and report on their research. This much in advance: just as city dwellers and country dwellers differ, city animals also have their very own way of life. The next time you go for a walk, you will see the animals in the park with completely new eyes!