Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

The term “blackout” originally comes from the theater world and refers to an abrupt switching off of the spotlights, which was either used as a dramaturgical effect to emphasize a punchline or simply helped when arranging a scene or changing the scenery. It’s no surprise that it was later adapted for the spaces of the so-called “Lichtspiele” (in German, a synonym for movie theatre). What does it mean when the background is no longer visible? What does a background erasure mean compared to a free-form select of the foreground? And is there a complete erasure of the background at all, or are traces always left behind that can at least be guessed at? – M.A.

Short portrait film of a young man walking through the city.

The video quadro (italian for square, picture, frame) is a cinematic portrait of a monumental low-cost housing complex built in the 1960s in the port city of Trieste. Like a hilltop fortress, this imposing square complex towers over the city. The social utopias of the time were expressed in this structuralist building, resulting in a bold concrete construction that was out of scale.

Slovenia? For many, if not most passengers on any international airliner, Slovenia is easily missed while crossing its territory in less than ten minutes. A hiker on the ground, however, would be forced to explore, within an entire life-time, the stunning variety of natural monuments, scenic landscapes and wildlife lined up along a one-hundred-mile transect from sea to summit – from the olive gardens of Slovenia’s Mediterranean coast to the snow-covered peaks and high pastures of the Julian Alps. Connoisseurs have described Slovenia as “a world in a nutshell”, and with some justification: nearly two thirds of the country’s area are greened by unbroken woodland that reminds of Canada. Ancient Mediterranean oaks, beech forests with canopies like cathedrals, hanging pine woods clinging to near-vertical, inaccessible mountainsides up to the treeline harbour more pristine habitats than countries ten times the size of Slovenia.

Ten years have passed since the First Congo War, six since the beginning of the UN mission there. Rape is still being employed as a weapon. In White Substance everyone involved is given an opportunity to speak: the victims and the perpetrators, and also the individuals in-between.

A rare and beautiful example of detailed real-world observation, without any of the structuring devices typical of newsreels: With indelible glimpses of the Jewish quarter, the Prater, the Naschmarkt (open-air food market), and bourgeois flâneurs promenading in the city center in 1919–20, Vienna’s urban space is meticulously and unhurriedly laid out, as if intended not just for the contemporary public, but also for future historians of cosmopolitan city life.

Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen is regarded as one of the most important milestones in the history of music. In the first part, the Rheingold, it begins with the chain of fateful entanglements that ultimately attracts the downfall of the race of the gods.

College student Flora goes home for the weekend to celebrate her mother’s birthday. While she helps her grandma in the kitchen, witnesses her teenage brother’s life and listens to the conversations at the party, she slowly begins to rethink her priorities.

Their ethnic roots are different and they are neither blond nor thin; this a cappella ensemble is their own creation. Three powerfully voiced singers and their pianist tour Austria and Germany, performing a program of soul and gospel. Trendy cafés and village church, everyday life as a musician and survival away from the international charts.

"I Wanted to Live" was a 1982 documentary film about drug addiction by Alfred Ninaus. Twelve years later, what has become of the drug addicts? Have they managed to dry out, come clean, and stay that way?

The hypnotic wasteland of Southern California is infused with the free-spirited nature of Easy Rider, the alienation and uprootedness of Michelangelo Antonioni, and the deep transcendence of Werner Herzog. It speaks to us through fragments of dialogues from iconic films, and yet it remains elusive and dissolves into abstract shapes, rhythms, and compositions. The landscape as a captivating and intangible, all-encompassing and insubstantial yet full emptiness becomes the means for the transgressive experience of two temporalities – the “real” time of people and the time of natural processes. “How much further do we have to go? I don't know. Not much further. That's what you said this morning. I sometimes say it all day. Really? You say it all day? We don't have much longer. We'll be there soon.” (L. Marxt)

A story of the inner life of a military base as a microcosm that seems to have been plucked out of another time. Soldiers focus meticulously on gardening instead of preparing themselves for war.

Who’s Afraid of RGB can be interpreted as a condensation of the romantic movie, drama, and melodrama. The black-and-white film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is mirrored in nine eyes and superimposed with the colors red, green, and blue. Paralleling her previous treatment of the horror film and the road movie, Who's Afraid Of RGB subjects the genres of romantic movies, dramas, and melodramas to Roiszian compression.

Like a dark screen stencil, a young woman dances in front of an open window. Although the film is silent, the rhythm of the music to which she dances can be imagined through her movements, often ecstatic.

The cargo ship MS Valentina covers 1640 danube kilometers on its route from Linz, Austria to Russe, Bulgaria. It crosses through seven countries while doing so. The River as an „European Road“ is full of opposites and differences.

Sometimes I film so that the actors seem to belong to the undead. The construction of the Found-Footage-Party shows Russian, Japanese, American and my own material which is hallucinated into a matrix in which functioning and non-functioning body parts appear as optical lubricant whilst simultaneously we hear someone shaving.

This documentary accompanies the truck squad Treibstoff („Fuel“) for one year in their search for a home. The idea of vehicle sites is fairly new in Austria and confronted with quite a few problems. We experience first hand their major efforts for a political solution to legalize vehicle sites in Vienna. They express their hopes, wishes, motivations, fears or anger and move like an odyssey from fallow land to fallow land. The landowners are not interested in this alternative life-style and always come up with the same excuse: Something will be built here! With every removal tensions are rising...

Following Bellavista and Totó, Peter Schreiner completes his informal trilogy of epic, black-and-white digital-video essay-films with the utterly monumental Fata Morgana. Shot in the Libyan desert and in an abandoned building in Lausitz, Germany, it features a man (Christian Schmidt), a woman (Giuliana Pachner, from Bellavista) - and, glimpsed now and again, a guide (Awad Elkish.) They talk, they fall silent. Winds blow. The sun shines. The camera runs. What gradually takes shape is nothing less than a painstakingly concentrated attempt to understand the human condition through the lens of cinema. A lofty ambition, and one that demands a considerable leap of faith on the part of the audience: this film is sedate, "difficult", challenging, often apparently impenetrable. But anyone who has seen Schreiner's previous films will be aware that he is by any standards a major artist, one that can be trusted to find places that other directors may not even suspect exist.

An act of violence forces a young mother and her 3-year-old son to flee across wintry Austria. On her journey she has to face responsibility and eventually realizes that we all leave traces in the lives of others, whether we want or not. A story of liberation.

Lizzy is in love with Bernhard, but Bernhard is undecided. Lizzy returns Bernhard’s dog, which she occasionally watches, and stays a little longer. Lizzy shows Bernhard some kung-fu moves; Bernhard starts to flirt; and, although it’s not like her, Lizzy gets embarrassed. The same night, Bernhard asks her to drive him to a party outside town. A tense ride begins.

Composed of 28 static-camera scenes from everyday (occupied)-Tibetan life, each picture (without narration) a "narrative" lasting several minutes, these 28 views explore the contradictions between the traditional way of life and modernism's obvious invasion of Tibet.

The largest casino in Europe but is it just a big mess? Daniel Hoesl presents Un gran casino as an angry musing on a building, an Italian village and all that is done in the name of the unfettered creation of wealth.

Love itself is more important than the object that inspires it, writes one woman to another. The one is Rosa Luxemburg, interned as a political prisoner in Breslau, the other Rosa Liebknecht. In Astrid Johanna Ofner’s poetic film essay with shots of Berlin and Vienna, the letters from 1917–1918, shortly before Luxemburg’s murder, become a melancholic flow of love, comfort, and hope. An enchantingly beautiful film.

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla continues her high-profile championship of the works of the composer Mieczysław Weinberg with this new Salzburg Festival production of his final opera, The Idiot, with a libretto based on Dostoevsky’s great novel of innocence destroyed by corrupt society. Featuring music of great power and intensity, the opera, completed in 1985, showcases Weinberg’s remarkable skill as a musical dramatist, while this new production by Krzysztof Warlikowski promises to mark a watershed in its brief performance history.

Around four and a half million people currently work in Austria, but one in five of them does not have an Austrian passport. Hanno Settele fictitiously sends this group on vacation for exactly one day. What would happen on this day without foreigners in Austria?

Irene is facing a new beginning. On the one hand, she's separated from her husband and is moving out of their shared apartment. On the other, the eviction of the tenants on the floor above her. They are responsible for months of noise pollution caused by unbearable water noises. Finally, peace returns to Irene's life. But only seemingly. Because suddenly, the water noises mysteriously return.

A NORMAL LIFE shows the personal everyday life of four Bosnian women who were forced to flee their home country due to the consequences of the Yugoslav Wars and have been working as cleaning women in Vienna ever since. We get personal insights into their lives, their work, their urge to build a new life and their personal way of overcoming trauma.

Following an act of violence, two loving sisters plan to take revenge on the unconvicted perpetrator and find themselves being pulled deeper and deeper into the darkest areas of their minds. As they are constantly confronted with their fears, they must figure out if the decision to take the law into their own hands can be the answer to their pain.

A father has an extraordinary conversation with his son after a hard working day.

Episodic film based on the book by and starring Friedrich Torberg.

Short film depicting a man and woman smoking.

A film about the question of what it means to live a life that has no negative consequences.

Two women in two different countries leading different lives. One lives in Austria, one in Yugoslavia, yet their lives become strangely entangled for a moment in time. What if you wake up in somebody else's head and the city around you isn't the one you used to know?

A businessman visits his father after a long absence. His parent's house is supposed to make way for a highway. The son wants to send his father to a home. He is unexpectedly confronted with a young woman at the home.

"The title says everything."

H. C. Artmann transforms himself into some of the characters he invented, who bring his texts to adventurous life.

Salton Sea was the largest inland lake in California. It was also an atomic bomb test zone.

The man in the white coat does not seem to be in a hurry as he overstretches the lifetime of his patients waiting in the waiting room to tell them the exact time of their death. Sebastian Doringer's black-humorous satire shows that time does not always mean money, and that the "Gods in White" do not always heal, but do have life in their hands.

A single day: from the tender break of dawn to the darkest night. One out of many days to come? Quite possibly the very last. A long farewell, an ultimate goodbye to a life we have grown to hold dear. Leading to a head-on dive into a new reality, into a new state of being. To long for the unknown. To desire to be at the mercy of chance. Last caresses in solidarity, last minutes in shelter. End means beginning. Death becomes birth. From water, back into water. From gas to solid. Everything is commenced by woman, everything ends with a woman.

In the midst of Kosovo, an area that’s been haunted by war and ethical conflicts, Elias Elhardt discovers the small ski resort Brezovica. With several abandoned hotels and lifts, time has seemingly stopped here since Yugoslavia’s breakdown over 20 years ago. Snowboard enthusiast Hamdi is one of the locals, that now wants to breathe new life into this special place. He guides Elias through this forgotten world and reflects on the question, how a future can be built if the past still weighs so heavily.

FUDDY DUDDY uses the motif of the grid to blow it to pieces. Being occupied with structural film, I repeatedly draw 'frame plans', using grid structures to precisely record the succession of individual images. To me, this sometimes seems like a search for structures in an apparently chaotic world. The medium of film fulfils the need for orientation. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)

For the artist Fernand Leger (1881-1955), the promise of film as a new art form lay in its potential to exhibit the visual, to present an image rather than tell a story. This attribute characteristic of early cinema, a ’cinema of attractions’ (Tom Gunning), has been directly associated with avant-garde film in terms of visual exhibitionism as well as the construction of an audience that is both directly addressed and actively engaged.

Five middle-aged Viennese friends—Karl, Martin, Georg, Max and the youthful Kurt—head out for a camping weekend in the Prater wetlands, only to find a group of schoolgirls sunbathing nearby, which sets their imaginations running and prompts each man to regale the others with a lurid tale of his own erotic misadventure.

Animated short Film about best friends inspired by childhood stories.

A man who shot at people for no apparent reason, has been sentenced to prison. A young woman, a lab assistant, who is appointed as a juror in the case meets a sociologist who is working on a study of the penal system.

Although he enjoys a high standard of living and a hedonistic lifestyle, Berlin psychotherapist Harald is in reality determined gradually to kill himself. Only one obstacle stands between him and his desire to kill himself in front of the camera – Harald’s assistant, Martina, who loves and cares…

At the heart of modern Europe lies a silent paradox: while we celebrate sustainability, we destroy more than half of our wool—one of our most ecological materials. Through 14 interviews in 11 countries and following two shepherds over the course of a year, the film reveals a fragile knowledge interwoven into the landscapes and everyday gestures. Wool is not disappearing due to a lack of quality, but rather under the pressure of synthetic fibers, a byproduct of the oil industry, which releases microplastics into our world and our bodies. What is at stake goes beyond the material: a living connection between the land, biodiversity, and traditions that shape a sustainable future.

A bowl on the ground. The fallen leaves around it reference autumn. A letter enters the frame—aged hands tear it up, and its pieces fall into the bowl, not unlike leaves. Later, these pieces are burned amidst the darkness. The traces of a love story now over?

Documentary film about the Austrian graphic artist Alfred Kubin. Kubin's work is characterized by the depiction of fantastic dream visions, which are represented with a nervous drawing stroke. Kubin was inspired by the visionary and symbolic works of Francisco de Goya, James Ensor, Odilon Redon, Edvard Munch and Max Klinger, among others.

For the film “Eating Differently – The Experiment” a field is planted for the first time with precisely those grains, vegetables, fruits, oilseeds and grasses that end up on our plates per person – and which the industry processes into animal feed, among other things. A field of 4,400 m2 is created, the area of a small soccer field that the "average" citizen needs.

Almost entirely shot in still shots and revealing the corners of a house floor by floor, this is the filmmaker's second meditation (and a perfect continuation to "Tower House") about a particular architecture, as specific as it is captivating.