Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

"Mountain Trip is a cinematic myriorama constructed of hundreds of Austrian postcards, which reflect a country's hackneyed trappings as no other medium can." (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)

Focus On Infinity is a cinematic journey to the places, people and machines that are involved in exploring the origin of our cosmos and of our existence. It is a very personal and intuitive investigation into the roots and boundaries of our imagination dominated by sensual perception. Not unlike an adventure, the film dares to voyage into the unknown, to the structures of our intellectual capacity and drive to explore. It focuses on the restlessness that characterizes the natural sciences, which drives research with increasing technological advancement and financial resources, and underpins the never-ending human ambition to fully understand our world.

In 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, Film Journal No. 1 was released in Sarajevo. Fifty years later, after the collapse of the Communist bloc, this newsreel was lost in the confusion of the fighting in Yugoslavia. In Journal No. 1 Hito Steyerl attempts to find out how the footage got lost and what was on this document from the Sutjeska studio. In the simultaneous projection of Journal No. 1 the ‘unattainability of an historical zero hour of the national identity’ takes concrete form: The lost newsreel reports on a literacy campaign as well as Muslim women confidently removing their headscarves. We listen however to eyewitnesses trying to recapture the lost content and we see the artist Arman Kulasic making a number of drawings that resemble the story-boards for the lost film. What appears to be moments of great change remain limited by subjective and uncertain memory. The film was premiered at documenta 12.

Kren’s last film to include any direct reference to Otto Muehl is 12/66: Cosinus Alpha, a 10-minute film that completes a cycle of elaborate sensual montages and materials.

A short film by Kurt Kren.

On a weekend in June 1983, in what was deemed a "country outing,“ an impressive number of artists from Berlin went to a small village in Schleswig-Holstein; their intention was to give the local residents a taste of Berlin’s avant-garde art. This event included presentations of dance, music, performance art, painting, land art and film. Back in Berlin the footage was manipulated in several ways to produce an “experimental examination.” —independent film and video database

Marta's case is particularly significant because it breaks many stereotypes about gender violence. For one she never suffered physical abuse before the attempted murder and she does not come from modest or marginal family. As she says: 'There is no profile for battered women and it can touch anyone.' She also is a strong woman and a fighter who is not afraid to criticize the ineffectiveness of institutions. For me as a man was also very important to approach the male and try to find out what happens inside a violent man and what leads him to violence. In this sense i found the work of the therapist Harald Burgauner, who is one of the most prestigious specialists in Austria, of particular interest.

Two Graz residents in their late 20s, Vera and Jonas, engage in a merciless battle of the sexes while wild camping in an isolated gorge in Upper Styria; and the wilderness still has a few surprises in store for them...

An experimental film, the last in Peter Kubelka's trilogy of “metric films”. Each frame of Arnulf Rainer is composed of darkness or light and silence or sound.

What unites us all, regardless of the circumstances or part of the world we live in? Is simply being human the lowest common denominator? In their experimental documentary, Juri Rechinsky and Mario Hainzl explore this question by equipping women and men of different ages with body cams—in Austria, Senegal, the U.S., Japan, and on the Ukrainian front. An intimate, point-of-view journey through many lives and realities, revealing how close we actually are.

“I know you” is easier said than “I know myself.” Here, someone probes their own fear in a childlike voice and sketchy images. There are certain pieces of evidence, like the shovel used by a young woman to dig a deep hole. And there is that black thing that grabs her soul like a spider. A cautious and curious mutual approach in sometimes concrete, sometimes abstract ink drawings.

It's an ordinary day in the game GTA V – but the car-crowded streets are marked by a grave absence. Protagonist Edgar searches for clues, revealing the beautiful yet nightmarish nature of his reality.

"There is, indeed, the unspeakable": inexplicable phenomena and surprising associations, mysterious outbreaks, torture chambers and substances that expand consciousness.

Russian-born director Aleksey Lapin travels back to his relatives’ home village near the Ukrainian border, where he himself used to spend every summer. The film crew introduce themselves at a specially organized musical event, claiming that they have come to cast a historical film that is to be set in the village. What follows is a charming, semi-fictional documentary by and with the village community.

The film is uncommonly poetic and refined. The pictures come from a book by Federica Pagnucco and Linda Wolfsgruber, realized with printed characters in wood and lead. An old printing tecnique, well blended with wood-printed shapes, which gives a special aura of magic to the book, and subsequently to its animated version, thanks to the participation of Thomas Renoldner and the evocative soundtrack by Peter Rosmanith. It is a precious film owing to the rare suspension of the atmosphere and time, actually fixed and focusing on small things, habits, interstices, in the end, worlds...

“What if women could move a house?” In “As If Biting Iron” (2019), Rizaj uses the medium of film to challenge this very question as we witness the walls of a brutalist building, situated in the forests of Kosovo, being moved by the forces of over 100 anonymous women. Pushing against the deadweight of the concrete, the burden of oppression literally and figuratively comes undone.

Documentary about five innovative models of self-organized collective living in Austria.

The portrait of austrian pianist and composer Friedrich Gulda based on archive material.

Text III is dedicated to Marianne, a young woman from northern Germany who worked with Adrian's mother at a military service office. She was living with them at the time of a bomb attack near the end of the war, and was brutally killed before Adrian's eyes while collecting firewood. So much for aleatoric, not to mention fate or chance. Excerpts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead can be heard being read in Tibetan. If you didn't know what was being read, you might say that something imperative can be heard through the clear recitative.

“When someone in the family becomes chronically ill, the whole family falls ill,” explains Celal Karaaslan. After decades of heavy physical labor, he is waiting for his invalidity pension. For him and his son Tolga, the waiting period becomes a search for a possible future—one that confronts both with existential questions.

Tim Sharp turns to places. In our world, these are always shaped and restricted, colonized and exploited. In other words, private property, which Sharp declares war on in image and word.

In 2020, for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, Philippe Jordan and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra recreated the mythical evening of December 22 1808, when the composer presented his Sixth Symphony, also known as his Pastoral.

A film that, through moments of humor, irony, and introspection, develops into a metaphorical exploration of repair, resilience, and the ambiguities of contemporary existence.

At once minimal and maximal, the latest experiment from Austrian formalist Björn Kämmerer recasts elements as simple as a campfire and three seated men into a paranoid play of gazes, variously suggesting assent and discordance.

Hamlet, an opera by Verdi contemporaries Franco Faccio and Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's tragedy, had a "triumphal rebirth" (Deutschlandfunk Kultur) at the Bregenz Festival, where the opera was also recorded for the first time ever. Faccio, who conducted the first performance of Verdi's Aida in Italy and the world premiere of Otello, and Boito, Verdi's librettist of Otello and Falstaff, anticipated the musical language of later Italian verismo composers so their opera combines lovely musical interludes with superb vocal writing. Olivier Tambosi's "excellent staging served it well, with a clear focus on the high points (The Telegraph)". "In the intermission and at the end there was vociferous enthusiasm of the audience for the late first encounter with this music" (Neue Musikzertung).

Go is the axis of FILMBLOCK I: the precise aleatoric narration. Chance and the will to form are perfectly balanced out, everything is change. The elements are further reduced in Go: the legs of a man and woman, moving closer and farther away, still, this all reproduced as a negative, with an atonal aggression on the soundtrack – one could see it as the story of an unsettled relationship. Adrian for his part might be dissatisfied with the fact that people almost compulsively would interpret it in this way, but if he didn´t want that to happen then he should have used more abstract material.

Each beat has its own speed, each tempo suggests certain images: Timo Novotny's video for Richard Dorfmeisters Sofa Surfers remix, which was shot in Japan on Super-8 film, begins with an aerial view of a construction site and a crane. As the bass begins softly, the images start to move up along a vertical line, apparently reflecting the path of an elevator. Everything is transparent, everything is structured: The scaffolding is echoed in the pictures frame, which rolls across the screen in a way similar to a poor film projection, offsetting the illusion of movement. Or the images accentuate the music through superimpositions, short zooms and shots through cloudy glass. (Dominik Kamalzadeh)

A visual nightmare inspired by the physical symptoms of anxiety and sleep disorders — dreams, dreamlike states, nightmares and fake worlds all merged into one.

Packed with intricate melodies, harmonies, and instrumentation, Johannes Vogel conducts the Synchron Stage Orchestra to perform Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major K. 551 in this elegant live concert stream. Captured in Vienna’s state-of-the-art Synchron Stage recording facility, experience the thrills and swells of a 40-piece ensemble - 30 string, 5 woodwind, 4 brass, and 1 percussion - comprised of talented musicians from renowned Viennese orchestras. Mozart completed Symphony No. 41 in C Major on 10 August 1788 – the final of three masterpieces he wrote that summer. Labelled ‘Jupiter Symphony’ by music critics, Symphony No. 41 is an example of divine perfection, brimming with the beautiful complexity, emotion, and excitement that represents the possibilities of humankind.

Elizabeth T. Spira filmed with cameraman Peter Kasperak at Vienna's West and South Railway Stations in 1997. Her interviewees were travelers, commuters, railroad enthusiasts, lovers, young runaways, ex-prisoners, smugglers and homeless people.

This Film was created in a one-day challenge.

Short horror film present in the anthology film "Gore Grind" (2020).

The filming of my discomfort at being a woman between the ages of 60-70 in our society has the function of a valve. It is based on the incomprehension of people who are not affected when I report negation, sometimes mistrustful reactions in daily anonymous dealings in public. Even women of the same age adapt to the general panic of old age, which may be the reason for this, and deliberately overlook each other. I, too, have noticed this exclusionary gaze towards ageing women.

For several years, the qualified biologist traveled around Innsbruck with his camera, looking for motifs and stories that describe the inevitable encounter between humans and wild animals in the Alpine region.

Gangerl, an aging dropout, embarks with a young film crew on a gruelling odyssey across the Indo-Pacific to the indigenous people of West Papua to discover the values lost in our consumerist society. A journey to find understanding for the mortality within his generation and himself.

Documentary about the first and second generations of Chinese immigrants, who have mainly ended up working in Asian restaurants across the country.

An exploration of the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past present and future, in the Atacama Desert, in Chile. Told from the perspective of the wind the film takes us on a visual journey, moving freely through the many sites and histories of the Atacama, from some of the largest lithium mines in the world, to prehistoric stone drawings; hovering above the remnants of colonial labour camps later reactivated under Pinochet’s regime, and slipping in the international observatory of the ALMA large array facility.

With this hybrid composed of documentary and performance video in split-screen format, Christlieb guides the audience on a spherical journey through perfectly composed image collages that open up painterly insight into the ambivalences of artistic attitudes and the methods of contemporary music production. (Diagonale 2023)

A single part of a three channel work, called Here, Her, Heart, Hovers depicts a young girl engaged in shadow play. A plain white sheet is all that stands between her and her grandmother, to whom she describes an ever-evolving world and everything what has come to pass in a lifetime. In witnessing from a place of childlike wonder, what starts in innocence quickly escalates to something more shrewd and disorienting.

Documentary, featuring a project of the artist Irena Pejcic. The Project adresses the situation of landmines and their consequenzes to the population in general, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The film observes in play scenes episodes from the daily routine of a 'completely normal family'. The use of the television and computer threatens to dominate family life and displace conversations, reading, games and sports.

Two villages in two nations are contrasted with each other. Two people live here: the maternal grandmother and the paternal grandfather talk a lot, but not with each other.

Marlies Pöschl approaches the electrosensitive Jill, who lives without technology in the French Alps, by adapting her cinematic practice to the life of her protagonist. Images and words yearn for a world beyond technological constraints. The result is not simply a respectful film about Jill, but instead, one that is created with and through her.

Nothing particularly special appears to happen in Tomatoheads: a regular couple doing regular things. But something becomes increasingly strange in the way they are behaving, something that the spectator cannot read clearly. The world seems to be turning upside down.

Short documentary essay is a goodbye film to director parents' house. As a point of departure for Anna Vasof, a survey of the damage left by a flood in her parents' house reveals a simple yet multi-layered work about memory, loss, and how we deal with the past.

Free sexuality is an ethical, moral undertaking. The artist clears away taboos. What really shocks is being confronted with the facts.

In true surrealist fashion, this Amazon woman has become one with the products she may have ordered online, merging with familiar tools around her house.

Vienna as you have never seen it on screen, in a film which baffled and impressed this festival’s selectors in roughly equal measure. A food deliverer in the throes of a tough breakup is forced to reexamine his life . . . This synopsis but only hints at the disorienting wildness through which, by the simple magic of editing, a bare-bones story is electrified into something jarringly and excitingly unusual and capitalism is coruscatingly critiqued.