Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

For over twenty years, the grandmother of filmmaker Katharina Copony ran a military canteen in southern Styria. She, too, spent part of her childhood among soldiers preparing for war—just as her mother and her mother’s siblings had done before her. *In the Barracks* sketches a multigenerational portrait from a female perspective through brief fragments of memory. Personal experiences, narrated off-screen, and reenactments featuring child actors reconstruct, within the present-day context of barracks life, an extended family history spanning from the postwar period to the late 1970s. A film of memory narrated by a collective voice.

A German Film Award winning short documentary about disaccharides.

Three friends from Tehran are dropped off by their smuggler near the Austrian border. They have to spend the night in the Slovakian forests until the next truck picks them up. The prospect of a new future drives the three of them on despite the harrowing journey. Over the course of the night, the group is confronted with a drastic twist of fate.

A 12-year-old's struggle to prevent his 70-year-old dad from attending his classmate’s party leads to a tricky situation.

A music video based on frame-by-frame animation for an original piece of music. Shown is an everyday, morning scene at home in the life of a young woman in the form of one single continuous shot.

M encounters an unusual light while being mellowed out in the water and gradually gets attracted to it. The light is enchanting but seems quite daring at the same time. The search for the light begins, and so does the unexpected spread of the fire.

It considers the mundane poetry of casual sex. Here, Lutz arrives at Holger’s apartment for a hook-up.

Die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies is not a conventional portrait of an artist, but rather, documents the creation of the eponymous painting by Franz Ringel. The creative process is not depicted as isolated from the painter’s everyday life, instead, the film asks what drives the artist.

Contours in constant transformation, a movement through space. Gentle changes of location that colorfully merge into one another turn out to be a journey of discovery through a town. In his works, Norbert Trummer reacts to concrete experiences of place and lets various phases of the painting process become the basis of his animation.

After a revitalizing experience on his way to work , Charlie is driven to reconnect with his past.

Silhouette animation prepared to be shown during a scene change of the Fritz Kreisler operetta "Sissi".

In 1731, nineteen "vampires" were burned at the stake near Olomouc, including seven children. In Banat, a part of present-day Serbia, reports of "people drained of blood" became more frequent. Empress Maria Theresa wanted to put an end to the goings-on and commissioned her personal physician Gerard van Swieten to shed light on the matter.

A 1994 independent film.

Short poetic documentary about Salzburg.

After a long day at work they meet under thundering highway bridges. Equipped with rods and nymphs, the men hunt in the barren sweet waters of the suburbs for fish. But between concrete pillars and evening traffic, the fishermen's hearts find no peace and so they set off in search of the distant and dreamy murmur of the sea.

"Beautiful Homes" in the province. Martin loves Agnes. Agnes loves Martin, platonically. Daily routine after lunch: SEX. They have no secrets, but stringent regulations. Everything super-duper? If only the ARCHITECTS OF LOVE knew more about statics.

Three people from a village head to the big city.

Frau Maria is the last employee of Stastny Fabrics, a shop in the former textile district in the heart of Vienna. While she prepares bales of fabric for the clearance sale in premises that have gone unchanged for decades, she tells of better times, when business flourished and work was a pleasure. She removes the company nameplate and locks the shop for the last time: With it a part of Vienna’s Jewish history disappears.

In this film the goal of destroying film semantics has been consistently followed though. Part of the film is composed of a seemingly collision of picture and sound. Whilst filming, the colors called out in the sound were really filmed. Because of the "mistakes" made (unfocusing, copying process, color temperature) the colors in the final printing were wrong. The audience is then confronted with these discrepancies. (E.S.jr.)

The tone is lyrical, the voices are real, the bodies are sketchy: A couple talks at the phone and in bed (a casanova and his victim). "You helped me, you made me strong, but you can't blame me for anything. When somebody loves so blindly, they pay with their life."

Anton Webern's "Langsamer Satz" for string quartet was performed as part of the "My GAIA" concert during the Festival's 2012 edition. Composed in 1905, "Langsamer Satz" is in traditional sonata form and in the key of C Major; it would be another twenty years before Webern turned to twelve-tone technique. "Langsamer Satz" premiered in 1962, seventeen years after Webern's death, and has the longest playing time of any piece in his body of work.

Bodies and fluids, bodily fluids and fluid bodies.

A short directed by Christian Genzel.

How can it be that, despite the corruption scandals he has been associated with, Jörg Haider is portrayed as a hero after his accidental death? Nathalie Borgers goes to investigate in Carinthia. Her discoveries range from the comically bizarre to the strangely vexing.

Parallel Space: Inter-View is made with a photo camera. A miniature photo is exactly the size of two film frames. Optically it resembles a flickering double exposure; the former temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces which have a correspondence with each other. (Peter Tscherkassky) Photographic processes - the material transformations involved in recording, developing, printing and projecting - functions as metaphors for psychological processes.

A subversive and experimental film by Otto Muehl.

It’s not what happened first. It’s what happened next.

More than 2 months have passed since Jona, and his family are locked in their physical and psychological four walls due to a worldwide pandemic. With each day of being isolated the tension between the family members increases drastically and the mental health of each of them tends to crumble. After verbal confrontation develops into physical harm between Jona’s parents, Jona decides to no longer stay in this emotionally toxic environment. He decides to run, but his attempt leads to tragic consequences.

Danced fairy tale for children in sign language based on the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

A test film for the later realized "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" which was shot on Super-8 and premiered at Wels in 1985.

"Restless Solitude" is the story of young people who begin to perceive themselves in the context of their surroundings, though they cannot find an acceptable world within our civilized society. Instead of being accepted by a community, they see themselves as trapped in their adolescent dreams, because a world oriented exclusively towards material values cannot offer them an ideal place to live. Either one's spirit is broken when the individual is integrated into society, or the individual breaks with society. In both cases, the young adult is susceptible to seduction in a number of possible ways, eventually becoming a victim rather than a member of society.

Two friends, Martin and Anthony, meet after 15 years, share memories and reflect on their present lives. During their encounter, they go deep in the past of Martin's childhood to reveal a traumatic experience.

Overfart is a disembodied passage through a landscape which is inaccessible to humans, a landscape which is not a part of nature but an intellectual construct: In its artificiality, this work refers to Early-Romantic landscape painting­especially that of C.D. Friedrich­and its immanent religiosity. Though temko by general magic is virtually the sole element of the soundtrack, this work was not intended to be a music video. The abstract spatiality of the music, which was apparently set in contrast to the images, and their cycles complement one another to produce the same intangibility.

Aufgezeichnet in der Burgarena Finkenstein Grossartig, die Szenerie der Burgarena Finkenstein. Josef Hader, der Solist, weiß entsprechend damit umzugehen. Die unsichere Gewissheit, dass der Mensch nur einmal lebt, hat viele Gesichter. Josef Hader vertont diese Gesichter in "privat" und macht uns wieder mit ihnen vertraut. "Privat" ist gleichzeitig eine Verweigerung gegen und eine Verteidigung für alle, die dieses autonomste Rollenspiel des Menschenrechts als nicht normal abgestempelt wissen wollen. Beruhigend ist das nicht, nur befreiend.

If you get six when you throw the dice, you can continue to play - so always come up with six! You can advance on as many fields as you have points. White begins. The white pawn advances on six fields and takes the castle. The next pawn takes the bishop. The bishop takes the black pawn. The last pawn takes the black king. You win the game.

Vienna during Christmas time 2017. ION has read a curious article about Hitler, who might be found in Argentina, while his older half-brother Andrei seems to have other problems on his mind. Following the two Romanian half-brothers and their preparations for leaving the city, money is only one side of the coin.

During bombings in Kharkiv, many citizens are forced to find shelter in the subway stations. This is the story of different figures - a young medical student, who is the only person around with some medical knowledge, a teacher who gives hope to children and a pregnant couple, who believes in a better future, recollecting their memories and thinking about their future.

The "liquefaction of the liquid" is taken to such extremes that as soon as the guttural singing of Mopcut begins, the image space is overcome with spectral flutters and untenable fluctuations.

A family reunites in a holiday home in Styria during the run-up to Christmas for the first time in years. The gathering gradually spirals out of control, old conflicts resurface, new tensions arise, and a parcel – which under no circumstances should be opened – finally throws the evening into complete disarray.

A single mother, caught up in the responsibilities of everyday life, feels a desire to express herself and prepares for a casting.

Renata is obsessed with the love for the 'fiery angel'. Ruprecht, in love with Renata, wants to free her from the madness, but all his efforts are in vain. She goes to the monastery, but here too she is being haunted by the image of the fiery angel. The Inquisition accuses Renata of witchcraft and sentences her to death. Prokofiev's Fiery Angel is one of the outstanding operas of the 20th century. With her production, director Andrea Breth moves the action from 16th century Germany to the sterile environment of a modern psychiatric ward.

In the harsh Alps, a young golden eagle battles for survival after being driven from his territory. This film follows his journey from chick to ruler of the skies.

How to survive the end of the world professionally - A film crew accompanies a group of "survivors" as they prepare for the approaching end of the world on December 21, 2012. In doing so, they themselves find themselves caught up in a dangerous whirlwind of events.

A work of speculative cinematic writing, the film is about war and displacement, architecture and place-making. It tells the fragmented biography of the so-called Rock Church, an iconic building in Helsinki and its architects who were excluded from the canon of Finnish modernism. The architects' personal history of displacement due to the Finnish Winter War of 1939 and Soviet occupation is braided with the war on present-day Gaza. Past and present histories, temporalities and geographies fold into, and over one another collapsing time, place and identities narratively to consider, in the gentlest of tones, the impact of atrocities on contemporary lifeworlds.

The film captures the ambivalent nature of the Tyrolean landscape around the Bürglkopf mountain. The idyll of Alpine nature, grazing cattle, babbling brooks, and breathtaking panoramas is disrupted by the knowledge that there is a refugee centre at the top of the mountain. Unauthorized entry is prohibited, contact with people inside is undesirable, and cameras are completely denied access behind the walls. The strict regime that asylum seekers must adhere to guarantees them only one thing: a minimal chance of remaining in the safety of Austria.

The elderly couple Ernst and Leni regularly bet on the last piece of chocolate. They make a bet as to which of them will die first. Both want to die before the other, but each for their own reasons. In a black-humored and unsentimental way, both show that they don’t want to be without each other.