Navigator Film

Sandra Hüller portrays Ingeborg Bachmann on an imaginary day in Rome. Regina Schilling’s hybrid film weaves together reenactments, archival footage, and Bachmann’s own writings into a portrait that offers a refreshing new perspective on the author and positions her writings as a reference point in current debates on gender relations and power.

The simple staple bread has become a branded product with an increasing number of varieties and providers. The film provides authentic impressions in today’s world of bread. We encounter small craft bakers as well as corporate CEOs whose professional work is our daily bread and ask the question: how do you see the future of our bread? And: what are we actually eating?

In Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi industrialized moldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Through its notable structure and its captivating rhythms, In Comparison presents various methods of labor production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.

In 1942 Anna and Wasyl Major were sent from Galicia to Lungau and forced to work on farms. Only after the war's end brother and sister heard from each other. Both are staying in Austria and hard work on other people's farms still shapes their life.

This cinematic portrait shows the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl at work. The much-discussed ‘Seidl method’ is conveyed here vividly and directly: The camera watches over Seidl’s shoulder during the filming of his new production IM KELLER, and observes him at the rehearsals for his latest theatre production ‘Böse Buben / Fiese Männer’. The film paints the picture of a fascinating and exceptional artist using a combination of extensive interviews and excerpts from earlier works.

The film tells the story of 78-year old writer Fritz Habeck. The two essential themes of his cinematic interpretation of the artist's destiny are the lack of direction in a person who is creative, but trapped within himself, and the psychology of individual failure.

After "Ringel" (1972) and "M.J.J. Ringel" (1981), this portrait of the artist is Wilhelm Gaube's third visit to the studio of Franz Ringel, the painter. We see him at work and as a great master of Viennese sentimentality.

This feature documentary portrays one of the most important museums in the world, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. It presents a unique look behind the scenes of this fascinating institution and encounters a number of charismatic protagonists and their working fields unfolding the museum’s special world – as an art institution as well a vehicle for state representation.

Who was Helene Weigel? Using impressive archive material, the film follows the convinced communist, acting icon, and free spirit from her early days in theater to her escape from the Nazi regime to the founding and management of the Berliner Ensemble. The result is a powerful portrait that finally puts the “woman at Brecht's side” in the spotlight.

A region south of Vienna. A walk through history: the Turkish wars, the witch burnings, the persecution of the Jews, the Second World War. The historical witnesses: cemetaries, industrial ruins, the monuments of the postwar restoration.

Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.

At the Natural History Museum in Vienna, everything that is found on earth and in outer space and that humans can get their hands on, is collected, archived, and studied in the name of evolutionary research. Archiv der Zukunft captures the aesthetic appeal of the natural-history collection and its working process, illuminating the mammoth project of knowledge preservation and production hidden behind the building’s imperial façade.

A seven month journey on foot through Italy from the Swiss-Italian border down to Sicily, with a rucksack containing a camera, a tape recorder, and the traveller's tale "A Walk to Syracuse in 1802" by the German author Johann Gottfried Seume. A cinematic essay on travelling, the south and Arcadian longings; on everyday life in Italy in the year of the soccer world cup and the death of Alberto Moravia; on Italian rain and nights in Rome; on the landscapes of childhood and on the fact that strangers are the only exotic in Italy.

For more than eight decades, German Sinti and Roma experienced injustice. The film tells of the family of activist Romani Rose, their resistance and insistence on justice. The painful story of a minority between trauma and self-assertion. The two-part film deals with various forms of resistance by German and Austrian Sinti and Roma over eight decades. It is about rebellion against injustice and the insistence on dignity and justice.

It is one thing to survive the Holocaust, but quite another to deal with the lasting impact of this experience. This film portrait of Ruth Klüger, an American literary scholar from Vienna, deals with these issues by revisiting four significant places in her life: Vienna, California, Göttingen and Israel. Ruth Klüger also shares her thoughts on very personal topics: her childhood in anti-Jewish Vienna, her life in the States, her motherhood of two American sons and the culture of commemoration.

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.

A portrait of sculptor Mathias Hietz of Lower Austria, originator and head of the international sculptor's symposium in Lindabrunn. A look back at his beginnings in the fifties, then on to his current work.

For years the warships of the Soviet navy have been on sale. The destination of these ships on sale is Alang, a beach near Bombay. The cinematographic voyage shows a part of the last voyage of the cruiser "Admiral Fokin".