Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

Abstract short set to electronic music.

Andi presents his new navigation app in sign language with his low-budget team in front of the camera. Conflict arises between Andi and the production manager right from the first shots. It remains uncertain whether Andi can endure his problems until the end.

Documentary short about the construction of a subway tunnel in Vienna, using a tunnelling shield.

Documentary short about the construction of a subway tunnel in Vienna, using the cut-and-cover method.

False Neon God combines music, choreography and film, with each working as an interpretation of the others, as layers of sound and vision keep falling in and out of synchronicity while being opposed by their respective medium-specific antitheses.

A few years later: the reunion. Marlene and Maria are nervous; a shot of schnapps is quickly placed on the table. They exchange news, and hints suggest a love story that didn’t end well. Simon Spitzer, however, leaves such interpretations to the viewers’ imagination. Thus, the women experience a frenzied afternoon that not only speaks to a shared past but also reveals a present that diverges sharply from it.

Veronika Merklein takes a seat in a waiting room and tells “jokes” that all begin the same way, “A fat person goes to the doctor.” Canned laughter pours out over painful, transgressive statements. A clever, poignant performance that generates an oppressive feeling.

The exploration of the panoramic photo that the Mars rover Perseverance sent from the red planet to Earth in 2022 is accompanied by images in smartphone format and a voiceover that links human expansion into space with ecological and ethical issues.

The guest is punctual. On arrival, he is offered a glass of water and a few words are exchanged before the sex begins.

Portraying the personal experience of a fatal loss, the film seeks to verbalise the unspeakable. A journey through phantasmagoric realms, oscillating between shadow and light, past and present, sorrow and solace.

Thousands of centenarian olive trees were burned during the 2022 summer wildfires in Greece. As these trees have lived through centuries, their carcasses formed ghostly figures; the locals referred to them as mythological creatures.

In this film, language is used as a sculptural tool to create space and subsequently dissolve it. The cinematic image space becomes an ice sculpture. Its physical appearance is connected to an absorbing soundscape. The term entropy describes the thermodynamic state of an object or body, which is shrinking continuously during the film. The virtual space expands and the arctic volume dwindles.

A film consisting of the titles of films that were shown in Viennese cinemas at the time of its creation.

The eye operates with such amazing precision that individual film frames can be read. Nevertheless, when the content in their sequence becomes too different, the perception of the actually projected content is stretched to its limits. Shown in individual frames, the alphabet is something we can only assume while placing trust in its reproduction. The 25 frames per second are rendered a visual challenge. Additionally, as the spoken alphabet is condensed into one second, it loses its contours. The story, however, still remains complete; it is interpreted, which makes for the beauty of this film: Not everything needs to be perceived or shown, we fill in the missing parts through interpretation in our heads.

14-year-old Margarita is walking through the streets of a small village in Tyrol. A thunderstorm passes by at dusk and no one is on the streets. She lets herself drift, and through the brightly lit windows she observes the lives of others.

Through an unidentifiable object, letters that are color-matched to their background form the autobiography of Philipp von Gönitzer. The light fades accompanied by John Cage's silent composition "4'33"

This movie shows The Philosophy of Fine Art by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel word for word in a musical rhythm.

Woodshed, a term used in jazz, refers to practicing privately in a place where no one else can hear you.

The title of the film refers to a quote from a child set in the streets of Mexico City in December 2022. The work documents fragments of patterns and structures of the city as well as some of the urban impressions and landscapes. Through the use of single-frame snapshots together with some longer insights, we jump through time and space – and the film manifests itself as a cinematic diary of personal memories. Shot on Super8 film and edited with the camera.

Fair winds and following seas shows states and conditions of #crossing(thesea), #travelling(home), #(conquering)expedition and #migrating. The images are predominantly set in India, but avoid any exoticism. The hashtags in the film description invite for individual interpretations of the film material and serve as road signs on the path of different perceptions.

Lost silent short and the very first film Ernest Bošnjak made. The film shows a group of dancing girls near Capitol park (Županijski park) in Sombor.

Best friends Isabelle and Lucy share an unbreakable bond. But when a misadventure takes a surprising turn, the girls are forced to hide a life-altering secret. Fast forward 31 years and that secret thought so well hidden has come knocking at the door.

In Kohlberger’s second film that could be considered narrative driven, the artist fashions a dystopian fiction from the remnants of cinema’s past. Drawing on excerpts from obscure sci-fi films, The Electric Kiss imagines a world not unlike our own, in which people plug their brains into a kind of neuro-network that connects the whole of human consciousness. As cyberpunk imagery draped in VHS textures alternates with passages of prismatic visual noise (achieved, in trademark style, by feeding footage through self trained machine learning algorithms), a quasi-plot emerges: a man in a VR headset, literally and figuratively lost in space, subjects himself to a mysterious procedure to alleviate the ill effects of this new technology on the mind.

In an abandoned house, nature has taken over. Strange creatures arise, destroying the trailing memories of the former hosts.

Testudo Hermanni is a portrait of my mother, my tortoise, and mild winters - an intimately amusing story of familial relationships rising to the occasion of unpredictable climate change, in which providing mindful care, above all, plays a crucial role.

50 five second clips document daily moods. The challenge was to create a five second animation every morning with simple tools.

Through rap music in Austrian dialect women* take a stance on everyday sexism, misogyny, and sexual harassment, everywhere from beer tents to modern nightclubs.

A video essay that reflects on the inevitability of death and the difficulty of communicating the unspeakable.

Topology of a Tyrolean mountain landscape in a 16mm triple projection. The audio-visual as well as the auto-mobile machine traverse and transcend the valley from Boden to Bschlabs. The film was made during a residency at the Tyrolean Bschlabertal and reflects the topology of an abandoned place as well as the conditions of its own creation. A darkroom was built in the old elementary school, film strips were hung to dry in the classrooms and then projected in a self-built cinema in an old shed. The images were filmed on print material with a Bolex camera, they are thus raw and multilayered like the valley, created by manual labor as it is still the basis of everyday existence in the Bschlabertal.

A harmonious, liberated image of sexuality emerges from the hips, breasts, thighs and arms, sometimes blurred, sometimes glistening with liquid running over the skin, and the exciting forms that open up between them. This is what making love with, in front of, and behind the camera could look like. What’s more, the camera and its image begin to dissolve with the bodies and merge into abstract forms that inspire imaginations. It’s a bit like staring into a lava lamp and suddenly realizing that you yourself are the lava.

A staccato of light flashes breaks through the darkness of the night. For a brief moment, the past becomes visible.

A music clip made from a multitude of pictures from the collective memory of automobile virility.

A 1993 short film written and directed by Jessica Hausner. The film screened at Diagonale: Festival of Austrian Film in 2020.

The coalescence of physical and digital reality through smart contact lenses. We follow a white rabbit and enter an alternate reality devoid of capitalism but chock-full of unimaginable things. This film reflects the rigid, “unbreakable” construct of (social) reality. It addresses the discovery of the true self or of genuine self-identities in this new world full of possibilities and perspectives.

One day Sonja's mother discovers a hair barrette in her room of the retirement home. She remembers her shining youth she spent in Paris and her first love, Theo, from which she got the barrette. When her daughter Sonja visits, she tells her about her wish to go back to Paris again. Sonja manages to take some days off and plans to take a trip with her mother. But suddenly, a new project comes in which makes it impossible for Sonja to go abroad. Torn between the relationship to her mother and the responsibility for her job, she has to make a decision.

Car-free Vienna in the year of 2120. China, a 95-year-old native from Vienna, who witnessed the extinction of the car in the green 20s only from fragmented stories by her parents as well as by her late wife, tells about her personal memories in ZEIT ZU GEHEN. China’s late wife, Reni, was a journalist and climate activist and had played a major role in the extinction of the automobile species. With the help of that knowledge she has gained through her wife and the nebulous machinations of her parents, China is making a first attempt to reconstruct the history of the extinct species.

home.movie is an extremely mobile film. The camera pans, scans, jolts, and races through Martin Bruch's apartment, never standing still for a moment, and every shot is a pan or tracking shot.

The long backwards tracking shot through a trench in Kubrick's WWI drama "Paths of Glory", which follows the general as he paces along the line of soldiers and his repeated questions, are reduced to their pure geometry in Dietmar Offenhuber's study: Nothing is visible other than various accumulations of points, a line on the ground on which the "spent" frames are counted off in units of 50, and the camera's movement, though the original sound can be heard.

The Tabu Zone #2 Project (1993-1998), a production for the Festival of the Regions (in Upper Austria), was realised in the village of Münzbach: An area of approximately 1000 square metres was fenced off and excluded from any kind of cultural activity under threat of five years' punishment. A fixed surveillance camera took pictures of the zone (when it worked) at 15-minute intervals. The short film shows a fast-motion selection of the footage taken over the five years.

Following a climate catastrophe, Andy uploads themself into the digital afterworld. Even though they have a hard time adapting to the digital world, the omnipresent superintelligence insists that paradise is right here. The film was mainly shot in the metaverse Second Life.

Director Fabuli Schnibuli's cinematic tour de force whisks audiences away on a poetic, melancholic journey with singing seniors – cardigan-clad artists searching for meaning in a world devoid of it – to picturesque Marktgemeinde Großarl. Daring and delightfully unhinged, the film transcends all boundaries and conventions: It is a meandering ode to the absurdity and fragility of life, a profound meditation on the human condition, a dreamlike tapestry of past and present, remembrance and oblivion, and a subtle critique of local pastry culture. With his wit and sensitivity, Schnibuli conjures a haunting and ethereal hymn to nature's beauty and human intimacy, all underscored by the gentle rustling of leaves, the babbling of streams, the resonance of Günther's remarkable baritone. Those who embrace this thought-provoking and inspiring opportunity to rediscover their lives in the subjunctive will lose themselves and find themselves again – a true testament to the possibilities of cinema!

Short film based on the principle of an audiotape loop.

ABC is a journey through twenty-five years of film work, a visual alphabet of sorts that tells of thematic diversity in the three primary colors. A tells of Ludwig Wüst’s first journey to Egypt, a country where his desire to become a filmmaker was born when these unplanned recordings were shot. B is concerned with Wüst’s major theme in life: friendship. C is a poetic condensation on the issue of human existence.

Air is visible only in the things that it moves: in wafting curtains, billowing meadows, or swaying trees. Supported by Susanna Gartmayer’s bass clarinet compositions, Karin Fisslthaler composes an abstract experience from dynamic images that make the wind visible, audible, and perceptible in its essence—as a warm wave, as swirling chaos, as icy, whistling storm.

Sasha Pirker approaches the Viennese artist Heinz Frank through a playful, cinematic-architectural exploration of his extravagant home. In doing so, she discovers a labyrinthine arrangement of rooms and hiding places in which the building turns into a film, and vice versa. Nothing about it is deceased, instead, the enduring vitality of artistic creation becomes evident.

White middle-class hipsters dress up as hippies. Their performance of freedom meshes with Christian iconography as a voice ponders an upstanding life. Where people’s assholes are brutally shut tight, abolishing the hierarchization of bodies is unmasked as an empty promise. A bloody satire of heteronormative body horror.

On their road trip through the U.S., Eva Seiler and Johanna Tinzl search for a possible future. Between Detroit, stories of a member of the Navajo Nation, and the Google Campus, they are also confronted with the ruins of the past and injustices of the present. An urgent struggle between dystopia and utopia on the brink of the social abyss.

Voices of contemporary witnesses echo through the forests around Srebrenica. Together, they remember, recount, and mourn. Among them is Behka, whose brother, father, and husband became victims of the genocide. Spuren im Wald is the documentation of a personal and collective search for answers. A search in a present day that has a lot of lingering empty spaces.

Conversations with sleepless friends, nocturnal gazes out the window at dark streets and weightless dream sequences: on restless 16mm film, they overlap to a somnambulistic narrative to talk about what keeps us awake at night. After all, insomnia has long been a collective problem, tightly interwoven with the fears and insecurities of our era.

Whether in everyday life, on holiday, or during so-called leisure time: working hands that uncover, cover, wash, stroke, feed, and wipe are everywhere. Lia Sudermann and Simon Nagy interweave amateur films from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with reflections on the simultaneous omnipresence and invisibility of reproductive work, and the possibilities for making it visible.

With lots of empathy, at the beach for dogs on Vienna’s Donauinsel, Benita Buhl discovers cinema as a possibility to start up conversations with people (and their dogs). She listens to the dog owners and observes their four-legged friends at play. In passing, the latter emerge as free spirits whom neither people nor the camera can catch.

Daniel Chanoch describes his perspective as that of an outsider—as someone who is different. The things he talks about are different, his memories are different. Chanoch is an Auschwitz survivor. After forty-four months in various concentration camps, he was liberated from Gunskirchen in 1945 at the age of twelve. Film material from the archive combines fragmentarily with recordings of Chanoch, a contemporary witness, and the memories of the individual ultimately become a fragment of a collective history.