Discoveries from Austria World Cinema

A bittersweet relationship film about love, work and the daily struggle for happiness.

A political and poetic reflection on the nature and effects of revolutions. An exemplary starting point for this essaystic film is the March Revolution of 1848 in Vienna. What remains of a revolution? When is it considered to have failed and when and how are its achievements manifested? - The film combines historical struggles with today's forms of resistance and reflects on how the practice of collective memory inscribes itself in the present of a city and the actions of its residents. In view of current political developments, the film asks following Walter Benjamin: Do we have to protect the achievements of the past from the present?

10 minutes of black film.

After Nina moved in with her vampire boyfriend Simon, her relationship turns out to be more problematic than she expected it to be.

Material shot in 1908-16.

VISIONS OF ATLANTIS continue their everlasting symphonic journey, drawing the listener into the maritime depths with their first ever LIVE Blu-ray/DVD, which was recorded live at the 2019 BANG YOUR HEAD!!! Festival with the Bohemian Symphony Orchestra Prague. With unique and powerful live performances and an unmistakable interpretation of symphonic heaviness, VISIONS OF ATLANTIS are currently enchanting audiences globally. In 2019 the band realized their dream of captioning their symphonic experience at the highest level - supported by the orchestral accompaniment of the Bohemian Symphony Orchestra Prague for the very first time, the quintet captivated the audience once again with their impressive headliner set at last year’s Bang Your Head!!! festival. The outstanding symbiosis of Clémentine Delauney’s and Michele Guaitoli’s vocals, accompanied by breath-taking soundscapes and impressive scenery, will guide fans through the deep valleys of the untamed seas.

The words appear ghostly. Sentences form and take on a life of their own. The text changes, reformulating itself like a living consciousness. Some words are highlighted in a pictorial play of vibrant visual degradation.

Landscapes from Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) are accompanied by reflections on the ghosts of political struggles of the past, vision as an instrument of colonisation and the true meaning of the decolonising gaze that upends all order.

This film is based on Holes and Bone, two poems by American poet, lesbian and cult figure of the New York poetry scene Eileen Myles. The film is an exchange between two queer sensibilities and a dialogue between two women who have emigrated.

Images harvested on a farm in Mount Forest, Canada, captured with a hand-cranked Bolex on 16mm sound stock. Hand-processed in buckets in shimmering red light down by the old stables. A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees and flowers trembling in the wind. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.

"Utopia - C" is an experimental animated short film/animated documentary about my personal experiences and hometown-observations in this strange time that we are going through right now: On March 4th 2020 by incident I happened to be in my hometown Salzburg/Austria. Then things became weird and "coronoid". So I stayed and on March 15th I decided to shut down/shut up in Salzburg to work on these personal/animated hometown coronicles, that deal with some places I grew up with but also with some of my thoughts and observations between March and June 2020.

The film takes us through the home of the filmmaker Burgenland, Austria, during the Corona crisis 2020

A short succession of splits-screens gathers women in the throes of extreme states, screaming, with eyes wide, arms thrown up in dismay, angular eyebrows, stunned mouths ­– laying, running, standing, leaping to their feet: instants of extreme emotions sought and found in silent films of the 1920s.

A drama in the continuum of perturbance in the mixed-gender relationship. Based on shoulder and hand symbolism as historical body language, the history of women in the world of men is broken wide open.

The project explores urban edges as they correspond with the marginality of social groups who inhabit them. Distance, the anonymity of the architectural setup, decay, but also movement and interaction are subjects of a raw sketch that seeks to integrate a discussion about space and segregation into the discourse of the Common Good. The audio-visual language of the film uses a transparency and starkness of approach to reflect its subject matter. The fusion of architectural lines with sound through unexpected correspondences and synchronizations aims to generate a new kind of intermedial proposition.

Pupils find a bunker much more interesting than their PE lesson. But strange things happen there...

A story about a friendship – two young adults who haven’t seen each other for a long time, both got older and are dealing with problems they don’t understand.

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?

At the end of time. In the heights of the city. The morning toilet is a deadly game. The contract in the cinema. Localization is followed by application. The glimpse succeeds in startling. The power of the object now always goes beyond it.

Three "Wienerlied" singers, Trude Mally, Poldi Debeljak and Luise Wagner, are among the last folk singers who master the almost forgotten art of "tootling". When they are gone, a bit of Viennese musical tradition will disapear forever with them. Their life stories are one-of-a-kind documents of Viennese folk music.

"Adventure of a Dream" is the autobiography of a 20-year-old Romanian, Valentin Nita, and his dramatic flight from Romania to Austria after Ceausescu's fall in 1990.

The pilgrimage of Rocio forms a focal point of the worship of the Holy Mary and at the same time is a tremendous mirror-reflection showing the life and vivacity of the Andalusians in a strange spectacle incorporating all social levels.

Psychiatric patients refer to themselves as survivors, victims, former inmates, consumers, or users. "Nerve" potraits four persons from Vienna and New York expressing different positions and experiences of former psychiatric patients.

Images and sounds of Anpass in Tyrol, shot between 1970 and 1973.

Albania, 1994. Those who have left assert that those who remain are the ones who are afraid. Those who remain say, what do we have to fear? We have no time for tears.

During the Sunday-picnic of the Smoker's Club Horatio, six eggs are stolen. Indignant, the gentlemen of the club set out recover the stolen goods.

The dream of a man and a woman; love with razor blades, at night, alone. What happens, must happen, though it is not easy.

A folk-song based on the poem "blauboad" by H. C. Artmann. Bluebeard is an intriguingly handsome man who has killed many women in his days. He is luring his last victim with his singing and his zither play.

Every interior has an exterior. Every exposure is exhibition. My interior/exterior-consumed! Each cadre has a blatant lack of orientation. All questions remain unanswered.

Shifting between a suburban hostelry, domestic harmony and the idyllic setting of the Prater funfair, Johannes Holzhausen's documentation is a respectful and sympathetic observation of the long-term relationship between two people leading an unspectacular existence on the edge of society. A retrospective view of an unhappy life from the perspective of happier times.

The film focuses on the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna. The picture it paints is one which could apply to other parts of Vienna and other European cities, an insight into daily reality revealing how little people know about each other and how thoughtlessly they expect strangers to behave according to their values. We hear the views of Austrians and immigrants, Yugoslavians and Turks who have lived here for twenty years. Their conversations reveal hatred of foreigners and children and prejudices not limited to a social class at all.

It is five hundred years since Brazil was discovered. At that time there was no land ownership. Nowadays, "Terra" is, for many people, synonymous with life itself. A short film about clichés, myths, legitimisation of power and violence, and the helplessness of those who want to create something better.

The daughters of the Habsburgs were "victims of politics". This was stated by the former Austrian Empress Maria Theresa. From an early age, girls were raised in the Habsburg court in a political spirit - with the understanding that they had to marry into important royal families - regardless of their feelings or opinions. The Habsburgs were known for their strategy of targeted marriages - which ultimately brought them significant influence and position on the old continent and in the world. The Habsburgs were one of the most powerful dynasties in the world for centuries. And this was also thanks to many exceptional women who influenced world politics and made their mark in the world of men. This is their story.

Statues can die, too. Or, as shown in Leninopad, they can be cleared away from their public sites in an alleged act of liberation. After the political upheaval in 2013, Jermolaewa embarked on a journey through Ukraine, travelling to diverse settings to document the fall of now-incriminated statues of Lenin.

The narrator in the moving image work "GALAXY" is technology itself. "GALAXY" tells the story of the brief encounter of the two characters Touch and Long Swipe. The story is generated by an algorithm and offers an interpretation of an encounter of love and disappointment. Small deviations in the language and the narrative logic reveal our social imprint of how stories are expected to be told and how technology is programmed to follow these perceptions. The mise-en-scéne is a computer-generated galaxy of objects and images reminiscent of the organic, but dismembered and fragmented, reflecting on the possibility of creating new worlds and stories in digital space by following a subjective system of ordering.

A documentary on Huntington's Disease, a family torn apart and how a bike ride and one courageous Matt Austin brings them together.

Semra Ertan was born in Turkey, 1956 and moved to her parents to the federal republic of Germany in 1972. She worked as a construction draftswomen as well as an interpreter and wrote over 350 poems.1982 Semra Ertan burnt herself in Hamburg to give a sign against racism in Germany.

Dóra Maurer once said that the central theme of her work is "movement and the conceptual and factual effects of shifts". As her extensive oeuvre since the late 1960s shows, movement and displacement are always related to systemicity and structurality. The starting point of a certain, previously established system and the subsequent discovery of unforeseen deviations and breaks in this double characterizes the process that Maurer has realized in a variety of ways from her early graphic works to what she calls shifts to the "quasi-pictures" of the 1980s and 90s, developed from spatial painting.

If you stack all the happiness guides on top of each other, it would make a gigantic pile. Even Mount Everest would break a sweat. Many people attempt to conquer this mountain. Some return exhausted, others confused. One thing, however, can be said with some certainty: humor lives in the valley. Klaus Eckel, Austrian cabaret award winner, makes a declaration of love to discontent this time.

Erotic adventures of a young woman who starts a new job in a hotel.

"Mr. Darcy: The synonym for the romantic hero since 1813, as he first appeared in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. The book had several movie adaptations (especially prominent [were those from] 1940, 1995 and 2005), which not only inscribe Darcy’s character in popular culture, but also illustrate our capitalist notions of love and desire, as well as a wish for escapism into a pre-industrialized, pre-virtualized world. I, too, fell for Mr. Darcy. Thanks to my webcam and Photo Booth, I can finally have my go [at] winning him over." (Daniela Zahlner)

For decades, nation states and politicians have proven unable to decarbonize the economy. Oil corporations have funded climate change denial for a quarter century while their own scientists plied them with proofs of disaster. At a moment when most people feel the effects of climate change in their own lives, oil corporations have changed their strategies and are now pushing for the generalized use of technological procedures that would allow them to continue extracting oil. The world’s largest facility for testing carbon capture technologies on an industrial scale is the Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM), 67 km north of Bergen in Norway. This film was recorded there. TCM has operated since 2012 and is a joint venture between the Norwegian state, Equinor, Shell and Total.

A story of the inner life of a military base as a microcosm that seems to have been plucked out of another time. Soldiers focus meticulously on gardening instead of preparing themselves for war.

The video performance "Persistent Disturbance" visualizes the three-month travel route through South America in an absurd way. At each point where the two artists paused, a short sound performance was created. The performer runs tirelessly with a horn honking through the different landscapes of the Andes. Through this experience not only the different places are shown, but at the same time an acoustic scanning of the respective places is created.

For two years Hanno Mackowitz has been filming with the 2017 Freeride World Champion skier Lorraine Huber, one of the strongest female big mountain skiers in the world. The result is a film focused on the increasing human impact on nature and the man-made structures in the natural space using the example of Arlberg, Austria's largest ski area and one of the most significant in the world. Lorraine carves her turns in perfection, meticulously captured and represented in an aesthetic picture language.

The story of Suleyman, an elephant gifted to the Portuguese king in 1542 who travelled across Europe

One of the oldest footages of Zagreb, shows the local caffe "Corso".

A cheerful ritual in praise of Mami Wata, a mermaid-like water spirit of life, sex and healing. A joyful show of Friedl vom Gröller's particular sense of humour as well as another short song of praise for the unique beauty to be found only in 16mm film.

Through archival film footage, animation and spoken word poetry an experience of structural violence against women is exposed.

This structuralist experiment breaks through the traditional sequence of frames and uses double exposure to shed new light on the filmstrip. Cinematographie (literally "writing with light") consists of flickering black-and-white footage of almost unrecognizable trees that appears crosswise onscreen. The film is silent with the exception of two sounds at the beginning, and the damage to the image grows increasingly intense: we see cables, hairs and dust distorting it all. Occasionally, a bleak sun shines through or human silhouettes appear in an ever faster flickering. The Austrian filmmaker Philipp Fleischmann built a circular camera obscura construction in a forest, 360 degrees around, in which the light enters through a small hole and shines on light-sensitive material. Inside the camera, he placed two 16mm filmstrips side by side: one was exposed to the world outside the camera obscura, the other to the world inside the construction.

Let's keep it is a cinema documentary (99') about the still problematic attitude of the Republic of Austria towards the restitution of "aryanized" real estate which - for whatever reason - became the property of Austria after 1945. The film is also the director's bow to the victims of the darkest chapter of Austria's recent history. A chapter that seems to have been extended to a certain extent when it comes to restitution of looted property to the descendants of Holocaust victims.

We enter a constructed setting, against the background of a video wall that suggests we are in a restaurant. A Japanese restaurant, as can be concluded from the conveyor belt which forms part of the fittings. Running Sushi consists of a casual conversation between Steffi and Johnny in a sushi restaurant, while the parallel world of thoughts and sensations of both characters takes the stage. Each new dish has major consequences in the grotesque dream reality.

Adi and Stefan go on an adventure through Latin America with only their guitars and an old school bus. Exposed to hardship and injustice they discover that music transcends all.

Two uniformed guards keep watch over a cave as animals carry on philosophical dialogues about important existential issues. Is it time to passionately devote yourself to reality? What about the perpetual reoccurrence of sameness? Meanwhile, the solution to one of the most essential problems is apparent: you just have to wash, peel, cut, and mash it. The apple. The serious practices of reality are calling.