Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

These shorts, executed between 1984 and 1986 in Vienna, exude an amazingly fresh intimacy and vitality. Referred to by the filmmakers as »home movies«, they record actionistic performances in the directors’ own living quarters, with added soundtracks of intermittent percussive sounds.

Vienna in the year 2032: »Friendly greenish settlements line the city«, skyscrapers are growing in the city center, »but old Steffl is still there and takes on all the high-rise buildings«. In the archives of the City of Vienna, the old archivist tells his grandson how old Vienna tried to oppose the new era a hundred years ago. "Old Vienna" is a conservative, anti-progressive place here, from which social democracy has made a "red island in the sea of capitalism".

The documentary filmmaker Robert Bober revisits the world of his great-grandfather, who left Poland to live in the modern and cosmopolitan city of Vienna, home to intellectuals such as Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and Arthur Schnitzler, on the eve of the National Socialist regime's rise to power, which put an end to the city's status as Europe's cultural capital. What emerges is an emotionally powerful double portrait that reveals a search for identity with universal resonance.

Prosopographia, 1976. 16mm film, color, sound; 5 minutes (unfinished).

Knittelfeld is a small Austrian Town and looks exactly like an Austrian small Town. Contrary to other Austrian small towns Knittelfeld had to face a challenge. In 1977 the family Pritz moved into Knittelfeld and confronted the town with an unusual degree of suffering, crime and manslaughter. - Sixpack Film

2006 short by Dietmar Brehm

Roque Dalton was the Bertolt Brecht of Central America. His political struggle against the Salvadorian dictatorships brought him into jail various times. He became throughout Latin America a symbol for the fight against social injustice and helped establish one of his country's first guerrilla organizations.

A tribute to a humble but great man in the film industry.

Bhutan, long isolated, wants to open itself up to the world without succumbing to materialism. It wants to modernize without selling its soul. The benchmark for this development is "Gross National Happiness." In a project unique worldwide, officials from the Ministry of Happiness are traveling for eight months to determine happiness in the country using thick questionnaires. A road movie to the most distant of all goals: The film offers insight into a country that has until now been largely inaccessible to film footage.

The forest is an inexhaustible reservoir of life force – no one knows this better than the so-called resin tappers, the forest workers who extract resin from the trees. Black pine, in particular, is considered especially productive in its later years. In Hernstein, the old tradition of resin tapping has been preserved. The resin from here is considered among the best in the world and is used, among other things, to make ointments. Director Wolfgang Niedermair accompanied the people here and documented their lives in harmony with nature. He portrays a hard but also fulfilling profession, one that is practiced by only a few today.

2010 | this video was the trailer for DIAGONALE Filmfestival 2010/Graz/Austria.

A woman who is found nearly beaten to death tells the man that saved her a horrific story that involves necrophilia, a woman cutting out her own child with a knife, etc.

Kurt Kren short

An atmospheric experimental film in which dense fog, fractured neon light, and muffled foghorns dissolve orientation. Drifting through an unstable cityscape, the camera reveals a fading “Europa” sign, reflecting inner isolation and a growing sense of political fragility.

Pavia, Lombardy, April 2025. Friedl vom Gröller unpacks her 16mm camera and films: first a wall, then the pattern of a shirt, then a clothing market. Some items cost one euro, others three euros. People rummage, try things on, argue. Life can be so simple.

Unboxing as a happening: three friends rummage through Uncle Joe’s belongings in Los Angeles. Amid yellowed postcards, medieval torture devices, gossip, and incense, Soli, Katy, and Sharon create an enjoyable bond between this life and the hereafter.

A young couple on a gloomy quest to find each other, trapped in a confined space, in a car, on a winter trip to a vacation destination that is supposed to give their relationship a new kick. Silence and trivialities prevail in this standstill of the relationship. Only the woman's transformation in a gas station restroom from a conservative woman dominated by him to a self-confident and lascivious hitchhiker brings the actual desires and passions of the two to light.

short film by Stefan Schönauer

The life of Henri-Désiré Landru, French serial killer of around 300 women.

Liump! Heuriger is the event bringing together a traditional Austrian pop-up wine tavern and a moth-watching set. The idea of inviting both people and insects to the same table is appealing for its simplicity, its naivety, and its likely failure.

An American girl Gina Lee has become disenchanted with her hometown. She buys an airline ticket to Vienna where she becomes embroiled in an intrigue to uncover buried Nazi plunder resulting in her drowning, yet her fate remains unresolved.

A skier on melting ice — caught between motion and impermanence. This short film explores the fragile threshold between natural forces and human traces, drawing viewers into the glacier’s breath and immersing them in its fading soul. The melting glacier becomes the stage for a visually poetic disintegration. Its echo reverberates in the skier’s mind, pulling him into the depths of his own psyche. Snow fractures into digital shards; space dissolves into a shimmering breath of transience. A visual resonance of the climate crisis — fragmented, displaced, yet impossible to ignore. Created as a film school graduation project, this art film is both visually stirring and emotionally unsettling, realized with remarkable professional dedication. It marks a bold and entirely new approach to the ski film genre.

Watch endless movies, or the same one over and over again. With all your friends, or all by yourself? Big emotions and big dreams. Go to the movies whenever you want and as much as you want! Nonstop – dein Kinoabo!

When pilot Samantha’s spacecraft is struck by lightning, a system reboot is required. It should be a routine procedure, nothing to panic about. Co-pilot Josh reaches for the system-reboot flash drive and tries to plug it in, but the bloody thing just won’t go in!

With the sky as its protagonist, the audiovisual essay narrates how this place has become explicit, thus highlighting its fragility, the unequal power relations that inhabit it, and the neocolonial dreams that are projected there. Through a continuous nadir shot, abstractions, and metaphors, Above All addresses a wide range of urgent issues related to airspace, such as the accelerated extinction of flying species, violent remote control technologies, the intrinsically collaborative nature of air, and the political capacity of the lung in its struggle to breathe.

Using the example of the "Schuhplattler" tradition in a small Upper Austrian town, Songül Boyraz examines ritual acts that serve to affirm a collective sense of community while simultaneously generating a mechanism of exclusion.

What language, what images exist for the consequences of violence? The consequences of violence on the individual, on the environment? An experiment between animated film and literary text.

Austrofred, Austria's #1 Rock export, delivers with Giving Gas! a critical overview of the constraints and traps of the Austrian individual transport. But the Champion wouldn't be the Champion, if he didn't use his heart, brain and almost 20 years of driving experience to fight against these nuisances and always be a few Horsepowers ahead of his enemies.

Endlein, the cursed woman, has haunted the world with her companions for several centuries. In a cycle, she is driven by hunger for 80 years, after which she must rest for 80 years. A horror that specializes in hunting men who hunt women. Torn between hatred, bitterness, and the last shred of humanity, she will stray from her path and rediscover something she thought long lost.

The two 16-mm films ROTATIONS and PROJECTIONS (originally ROTATIONEN and PROJEKTIONEN) used one of the earliest three-dimensional programs for the graphic real-time output as a projection on a two dimensional screen. They were calculated and displayed with an interactive graphic screen of the Siemens Research Laboratory, Munich, in connection with a digital data processing unit. The unit allowed interactive operation – work under interactive visual control; a keyboard was used to change the elements interactively – for example, by specifying the number of picture elements, the angle of intersection, the speed of the sequence, and so on. The movement could be stopped for a static image at any time. Ces séquences de film de PROJEKTIONEN ont été utilisées en 1974 comme décor, projeté sur un écran, pour un spectacle de danse expérimentale avec Gerald Bohner dans la « Experimentierbuehne » de l'Opéra d'État de Bavière à Munich, sous la direction de Walter Haupt.

During her routine run with a new pair of shoes, a woman is unexpectedly confronted by her discarded old pair, seemingly come back to life with hostile intent.

It is about nothing less than love. This is what the Wartburg singing community asks for, and this is what Tannhäuser also seeks: he finds almost endless lust with the goddess of love Venus, and hopes to attain bliss with the "pure" Elisabeth. In his vacillation between satisfaction and renunciation, between guilt and protest, in being torn between fulfillment and exaltation, he corresponds entirely to the grammar of the Romantic age - and still speaks directly to us today.

Set against the tranquil backdrop of Vienna's autumnal forests and fields, this dance film explores the journey of individuals seeking solace and self-expression in nature. Bound by social expectations, each of them embarks on their own path to rediscover their true selves through movement.

…where do we travel when we dream – to hidden spaces, landscapes, countries, worlds? …what guides, confuses or frightens us when we dream? Do we move forward, do we get lost, do we get closer or even find… ourselves when we dream? One after the other we are dragged into different dreamscapes.

Tu Harimau, shot on coarse-grained black-and-white film during a trip to Malaysia, is a portrait of Edi Purnomo. Copony accompanies the local rubber tapper at work, a task in the jungle that essentially involves listening to the surroundings. We see him exploring the forest, collecting, waiting, and smoking. As he leans against a tree trunk and the shadows of the fan-like foliage cast tiger stripes across his face, the camouflage blends with the beginning of a transformation.

Angelika, who was raised strictly Catholic, falls head over heels in love with René on a vacation - and quickly finds herself in a basement brothel.

She - La8 - loses herself and IT finds her again. A short film by Niko Moser

A journey in search of traces through the profound processes of transformation of Albanian history. In the archives, in forgotten places and in the memories of different generations, fractures and continuities emerge, left by the transition from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy. Adopting an essayistic-poetic approach, the film explores the images of the regime and the regimes of images, revealing how much the history of Albania is inscribed in the fabric of its present.

What does 'refuge' mean: bare rescue from persecution and drowning in the Mediterranean Sea? Does it mean proper accommodations, registration and assessment of requests for asylum? Giusi and Rosario have set up a "Place of Arrival" in the Calabrian hinterlands that goes beyond the obligatory minimum. Instead of living in a centralized camp, 76 asylum seekers are currently being accommodated in several apartments standing empty in the village of Camini. Rather than pass their time in waiting, recently arrived refugees can work within the local framework of the fallow agricultural industry.

A filmed adaptation of the 1967 film starring Audrey Hepburn, Wait Until Dark follows Susy. a blind woman, and her husband Sam. A woman hands over a doll containing heroin to Sam, which he unknowingly takes home. A group of gangsters make terrifying plans to get the doll back.

She was one man's muse. For others, this musician and composer was a sex-obsessed monster, and for some she was both.The film shows the turbulent life of Alma Mahler-Werfel incorporating interviews with contemporaries, experts and archive material. In the center of it all stands the myth and profane reality of a legendary "femme fatale".

During a stay in Vienna, Hafif was stuck by store window mannequins, which fascinated her with their highly artificial quality. The discovery inspired her to create a series of photographs of the figures. Standing in the street, the artist captured them in their ‘natural habitat,’ which is to say, behind a pane of glass. Folding the surrounding scene into the pictures, the reflections in the windows refract our gaze at the figures. On a semiotic level, urban architecture and the female body blend into each other. To expand this photographic series into the film Vienna Suite, Hafif resorted to a very basic device: she recorded the photographs with a static video camera and edited the footage to produce a sequence of ‘scenes.’

A dysfunctional family dinner.

A man longs for something he encountered in the forests of Austria.

Laurus learns of Dracula's return, who wants to conquer his wife. He must now defeat Dracula to save his wife and son, while many vampires long for mortality again.

A collaboration to present a self-portrait from the perspective of seven different authors.

A 12 year old boy starts to openly express that he feels like a girl. Friends and teachers at school help him through this process. However, his parents think differently. They believe that the way he feels is because he's confused, wants attention, or has been influenced by things he's seen online.