Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

The third part of Neuwirth's [ma] Trilogy.

To this day, Gustav Klimt's private life is largely unknown. Klimt was considered an introverted and publicity-shy person. Only a few friends knew the knocking code that authorized entry to his studio. Eisenschenk approaches the artist and his mysterious world in a cautious manner.

Tourism takes its toll on the inhabitability of Venice.

From snowboarding latecomer to international superstar, get ready to take a deep dive into the world of Anna Gasser in this action-packed, full-length documentary.

Writer Charles Condomine invites a fortune teller to his home to study for a planned book and learn her particular jargon. A married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bradman, are also invited to the planned séance. The result of the necromancy is unexpected: Condomine's first wife, Elvia, who died years ago, appears. Was she summoned by her husband's unspoken wish? He is now married to Ruth, which makes his first wife's return from the afterlife somewhat unpleasant. Especially for Ruth, for whom her rival remains invisible for a long time. Meanwhile, Elvira settles down at home and woos her husband. Charles is initially flattered, but gradually two women begin to get on his nerves...

The chaotic period immediately after the end of the Second World War, from the perspective of children: For them, an odyssey begins that is unparalleled in the history of Europe. Millions of people are stateless. They are "displaced persons", people in the wrong place. In film documents and interviews, the film follows people on their journeys through liberated Europe.

A film woven around the idea that between early cinema and avant-garde film exists a connection.

Short documentary film on the great and powerful Tom Waits, including clips from live performances and interviews.

A non-access nitrate print is held by Filmarchiv Austria.

A short film that examines the internet for posts on LGBTQIA contributions in different countries. In numerous autocratic and/or religion-fetishized states, restrictions are introduced that block contributions on LGBTIQA+ topics due to homophobic tendencies and partially or completely block internet access.

Empress of Austria. Queen of Hungary. Queen of Croatia and Slavonia. Queen of Jerusalem. Archduchess of Austria, Grand Duchess of Kraków, Duchess of Lorraine. Duchess of Salzburg, Steyer, Carinthia, Carniola and Bukovina. Grand Duchess of Transylvania, Margravine of Moravia, Duchess of Upper and Lower Silesia. Zator of Friuli. Princely Countess of Habsburg. Princess of Trento and Brixen. Lady of Trieste. That and more. It’s Zita.

Gustav Klimt in search of the artwork of the present. Using Klimt's paintings, "Quiet Pond" presents reasons why kitsch is art, art is kitsch, and art is art or possibly not. Who can know and who can judge?

Christian and I are waiting in his apartment for men to be filmed having sex with him.

Picture Perfect Pyramid is a 16mm film which in counter-clockwise spirals, circles a large pyramid structure that was built on the outskirts of Vienna in 1983. Using twenty-four positions the film was shot over the course of an entire day, with one shot per hour. The camera moves continuously and almost imperceptibly, covering the surrounding area while the landmark remains centered in the frame. Today the building, a former indoor swimming pool, serves as a venue for various events; from right wing party gatherings to an erotic fair that presents a live show with lights visible even from the outside of the pyramid. In filming the building, a structural approach focused on geometry was used in order to achieve less subjectively motivated images.

Once upon a time we believed we would create a free and democratic place of endless knowledge through the Internet. Just a few downloads, swipes and dislikes later, we now know that we failed massively. 4Real!

With unique staging by Joachim Schlomer, this 2006 Salzburg Festival production of the playful opera Mozart wrote when he was only 13 years old follows a group of men and women who weather the unpredictable ups and downs of love and romance. The cast includes Malin Hartelius, Jeremy Ovenden, Miljenko Turk, Josef Wagner and Marianne Hamre. Camerata Salzburg, conducted by Michael Hofstetter, provides musical accompaniment.

Vampirism of the glimpse. The lady shaves her legs to a bloody end. The strategies of the art of viewing are laid down. Separation.

Idylls in which irritations emerge: Richard Wilhelmer's Strange Love (produced at the California Institute of the Arts) shows us this, implying an agreement with us that it's now normal to see irritations in idyllic vistas, always and everywhere. A clouded idyll is now a familiar, welcome, easily readable, idyllic image. So, one never knows for sure.

A young woman between two men who fight for her in an unusual way.

Space Seeing - Space Hearing uses sound and image editing, as well as split-screen effects, to create a performance from a motionless body. The work comprises six distinct sections that create a rhapsody of sound and image. The original full-length/linear film cut of the performance. Later edited into a different six minute work of the same name (released in 1980).

A report about an Underground Festival on tour through Germany and Switzerland.

Germany's economic movers and shakers get a thorough going-over in Friedl's docu-fiction hybrid, which doesn't hesitate to point fingers at those partially responsible for Europe's financial woe.

The iconic depiction of Joan of Arc in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film. Joan, destined to become a symbol of faith, patriotism and self-sacrifice. The separation of flesh and spirit. A little more and she would be a proto-feminist martyr. Is that too much to ask of you, Joan?

Gaston Solnicki plays himself in this cinematic tribute to his friend Hans Hurch.

Biggi presents daring topless pieces in a Viennese outdoor pool and causes a stir. Much to the chagrin of her boyfriend, pop singer Frank.

Wolves hunt their prey in the valleys between high-ranging dunes, bears and lynxes wander through dense primeval forest, and the big lakes are a magnet for hundreds of bird species. That is the so-called «Balkan». Today the «Balkans» stand for a Europe that hardly exists elsewhere. The mountains of Montenegro harbour one of Europe's last primeval forests with trees over 400 years of age. In the difficultly accessible hinterland we find the Tara National Park with the deepest gorge in the Karst Mountains - the 1.300 meters deep Tara gorge. Nearby Lake Skadar is home for 270 species of birds; no other lake in Europe can claim such diversity. Europe's last coastal forest area can be found in Albania and in Bulgaria and Romania huge bat colonies live in the cave-dotted mountains. In Serbia one can cross the «European Sahara», a desert covering a surface of 30.000 hectares.

In this poignant exploration of homelessness and friendship, the film follows Aleksander and Wenzel, two unhoused individuals, as they navigate the harsh realities of their lives. Amidst the challenges of survival, they find solace in small acts of camaraderie. Together, they search for shelter and support, but repeatedly encounter the limits of their possibilities and the dehumanising system they face.

The moral self-assurance of fairy tales is lost in the depths of the dark forest haunted by Manuel Knapp with his projection and recording equipment. He casts filigree white light, the strange calligraphic signals of a digital abstraction, into the existential darkness of a wintry forest landscape under a new moon; and by flashing a kind of writing on branches and tree trunks, he creates a cryptic choreography, a game of concealing and revealing.

A journey by car into the no man´s land of the Garden of Eden.

A spectacular chase between the prince and the monster opens the scene, featuring a love story with a kidnapped princess, two warring antagonists—the Queen of the Night and Sarastro—, "funny characters" like Papageno and Papagena, and, last but not least, the magical instruments of flute and glockenspiel... The enchanting music and fairytale motifs make "The Magic Flute" the perfect introduction to the world of opera for young and old.

New York, 1941. Shortly before his joint suicide with Lotte, Stefan Zweig meets up once more with his first wife Friderike in order to write his last work, "The world of yesterday". Flashback: farewells that anticipate something.

Down with body worship! With rhythm in his head, Ravel's Bolero and a handkerchief in hand, a fat man shows us the new aesthetic.

Sounds of a Factory: WAV to PNG translates factory recordings sampled from Youtube into visual noise patterns using scripting and databending techniques. Sound is segmented into micro-temporal units and algorithmically reinterpreted as grayscale pixel values. Rather than representing industrial labor, the work reenacts its operational logic: repetition, synchronization and normalization. The pulsating grain and the looping structure situate the viewer inside a rhythmic system in which perception itself becomes a site of power.

An Austrian short documentary appreciated at the 1960 Berlinale.

This is the story of a land, where forces of nature are at play - beyond all things that a human can ever dominate or be able to conquer. The birth of Tyrol was one of collisions, where previous far apart continents were conjoined, wedged together and piled up on top of each other. The result is a steep world of diversity on the smallest area: depending on the depth of a valley or the height of a mountain ridge, depending on its direction and position at the edge or in the middle of the Alps, depending on whether its slope is steep or flat, there is a spot in Tyrol that is icy or mild, lush or paltry, dry or full of water. This film presents the fascinating world of the high mountains with all their diverse flora and fauna and the living conditions throught the seasons.

When a young girl becomes trapped inside an airtight safe, firefighter Alex and her partner Jakob are called to a high-pressure rescue with minutes to spare. As oxygen runs out and the girl’s frantic parents demand action, cracks begin to appear in their story. What starts as a desperate life-saving mission quickly unravels into something far more sinister. With time slipping away, Alex and Jakob must uncover the truth behind the child, the couple and the safe itself — before the clock runs out.

Moves the viewer into the perspective of a foreigner. Mexicans who live in Austria and Austrians who spend their lives in Mexico: through clichés and yearnings - these emigrants create a picture of their countries, and through determining their location, attempt to their identity. They are accompanied by two cinematographers, who also go to a "foreign" place. Their views go along with the narrators and narratives into the respective, other country.

The island of Corsica boasts spectacular mountain vistas filled with unique wildlife. Explore the shrubland and meet moufflons, hybrid pigs and more.

A pretentious attempt at an art short film that revolves around topics such as self-harm and anxiety disorders.

Everyone has their own way of dealing with addiction, our two protagonists take the more interactive route to keep each other from falling off the wagon.

Xinyuan films in her personal essay film Jet Lag is her trip from Vienna to China. The hazmat suits on the aeroplane and the layers of tape sealing off each room in the quarantine hotel conjure up images of crime scenes or medical thrillers, although once she does gymnastics on the bed, the mood immediately shifts.

Two family stories, a century and two metropolises merge into one: Weina Zhao. Her parents called the little daughter "Vienna" when they emigrated from Beijing to Austria. Weina's journey back in history - from the cultural revolution to modern China - touches on the major issues of the 21st century: migration, identity and coming to terms with the past.

A teenager recounts what happened on the day she and her friends decided to throw a cat out of the window of a tall building in an English suburb.

Bernd Liepold-Mosser returns home to a place bordering the bilingual region of Lower Carinthia to talk to the people there about their “great son” Peter Handke. His search unearths the many unresolved contradictions and ambivalences of a small place where there is repression of the Slovenian-speaking past.

In this grotesque found-footage-film, close-ups of actors playing Adolf Hitler in movies created between 1940 and today are combined in shot/countershot style.

If all pictures became current, in that they pass by and in doing so, are connectable with one another, whether elegantly or obscenely, through translation or association—how would it be possible to fasten down a picture? Hito Steyerl’s light-hearted picture translations are about fastening things in an elegant-obscene way: In Tokyo she is looking for a photo series that she posed for in 1987 as a “rope bondage” model. While making inquiries with experts and authorities in the bondage arts (which are mainly marketed online nowadays), she found what she was looking for in a magazine archive. The cinematic tension is extremely high just now says the translator while Steyerl looks through photos of herself from her days as a film student.