AT
The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off — sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer-director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear — born Anthony Robertson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater — after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s.
Jun 2024
We accompany the 90-year-old filmmaker Alexander Hammid on a stroll through New York, wandering with him through the outer and inner landscapes of his world. The observation of details takes on a meditative character.
Apr 1997
A few hours in the life of empress Sisi; a summer night at Gödöllö. A game with operetta and melodrama; a grotesque with much colour, music, dancing, and bloodshed.
Jan 1994
Elena Wolff submerges into the turbulent world of the young, up-and-coming art scene of Linz. In a series of episodes, Asche tells of three couples and an outsider, of alpha males and muses, of loneliness, and the urge for self-realization. In doing so, this pop satire of the art world exercises a high-volume criticism of both patriarchy and the cultural scene—including unexpected vendettas and bizarre encounters.
Apr 2024
The accomplishments of four handicapped ten-year-olds are recorded on camera. Their determination to do and create is obvious in each action.
Jan 1998
Composed of 28 static-camera scenes from everyday (occupied)-Tibetan life, each picture (without narration) a "narrative" lasting several minutes, these 28 views explore the contradictions between the traditional way of life and modernism's obvious invasion of Tibet.
Dec 2005
Somalia. A policewoman sits in her parked car. After a while, she gets out, puts on her service cap, and enters the prison. There, decisive hours have dawned for young Farah. Organizational machinery starts up around him. Farah is examined by a doctor, instructed by the bailiff, and looked after by an imam. Farah is waiting for his parents to visit. “How are you?” is the question everyone asks him that day. Each time, “Good” is his concise answer. Only when the policewoman takes Farah out of town the next morning does the unspeakable become a painful reality.
Feb 2022
Billy Roisz taps into our sensual pleasures with this experimental interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. The largely abstract landscape, stemming from both analogue equipment and ‘deep dreaming’ – a generative AI technique based on neural networks – ranges from paradisiacal to hellish. Combined with the chirping, ticking and pounding soundtrack, in which field recordings have also been incorporated, the temptation is almost impossible to resist.
Feb 2025
Idylls in which irritations emerge: Richard Wilhelmer's Strange Love (produced at the California Institute of the Arts) shows us this, implying an agreement with us that it's now normal to see irritations in idyllic vistas, always and everywhere. A clouded idyll is now a familiar, welcome, easily readable, idyllic image. So, one never knows for sure.
Apr 2011
Bergmanesque ghosts appear at the bedside of Edward Weki, a 75-year-old Sudanese man suffering from the final stage of Parkinson’s: Alma, the nurse of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, and a female version of Death from his The Seventh Seal help the old man recover lost memories of his life on the island of Farö.
Jan 2024
Inside a museum, nowadays. A diorama represents two young soldiers in the trenches. All of a sudden, we are thrown into the diorama: the immobile soldiers come to life, there is terror on their faces – the camera dances around them – explosions, chaos, fog: everything flies about in the air. With every gunshot, they shudder and curl up
Jun 2015
"Stranger Than Paradise," vaguely associatively linked to Jim Jarmusch's wintery Eighties road movie, is a genuinely film-choreographed work: a hybrid, subtly futuristic chamber play for eight people and an investigative camera. Set in sunken moods and deceptive images, this dance film is an elegy that marks the transition from one species to the next. "Stranger Than Paradise" is a reflection of the systematic expansion of the human and animalistic into the mechanical and sometimes their hybrid existence. The body is obsolescent: it is still needed but the preparations for its abolition are in progress.
Jul 2021
A young woman move towards a house that holds a potentially dangerous spirit that has been tormenting her. The woman tries to fight against the film itself as it starts to cause the world to collapse.
Jan 1999
Broadcast on the Austrian Television (ORF) in June 1972, TV & VT-Works comprises a series of ‘tele-actions’ in which a cigar-smoking newsreader is periodically interrupted by public interventions raising the question “Is this Art?”. Disrupting the smooth flow of information and thus the illusion of comprehending the world from one’s living room, these actions interrogate TV temporality to examine the mechanisms of production and spectatorship. A work of culture jamming avant la lettre.
A man rescues a boy and later tries to get him off his back but to little avail, so they end up drifting around a subterranean world, populated by grotesque masked figures. A hundred years after Chaplin filmed his first feature film, The Kid, Norbert Pfaffenbichler offers an experimental punk-style interpretation, which the filmmaker himself has defined as a dystopian slapstick film.
Jun 2021
The day came to a lonesome night / It lasted for such a short time / Does it stop / Love lasts or it doesn't / "Tu veux ou tu veux pas"
Jan 1995
Dropping Furniture shows the destruction of a living space. The film is conceived as a symbolic image for the loss of an existence.
Oct 2008
A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.
Jan 1985
Anton and Franz live together since the beginnings of 20th century. They talk about their difficulties of being vampires, since their first bite in 1938. Their inconsistent arguments recall those of normal human beings. And history repeat itself. As if that were not enough, they also doesn`t really like each other much.
Mar 2019
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.
Oct 2021