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
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
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
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
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
In the darkroom, 50 unexposed film strips were laid across a surface, upon which a frame of "La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumière" was projected. The stringing together of the individual developed sections make up the new film, which reads the original frame like a page from a musical score: within the strips from top to bottom and sequentially from left to right.
Jan 1984
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
FUDDY DUDDY uses the motif of the grid to blow it to pieces. Being occupied with structural film, I repeatedly draw 'frame plans', using grid structures to precisely record the succession of individual images. To me, this sometimes seems like a search for structures in an apparently chaotic world. The medium of film fulfils the need for orientation. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)
Oct 2016
Salton Sea was the largest inland lake in California. It was also an atomic bomb test zone.
Oct 2020
Every encounter with an image, every interaction searches for its own form. She is the other gaze is a collaboration with five female visual artists of an older generation who have been part of the Viennese art scene since the 1970s and engaged in the women's movement. In dialogue with the filmmaker Renate Bertlmann, Linda Christanell, Lore Heuermann, Karin Mack and Margot Pilz share their early works and artistic practices. They remember how their self-determination evolved between artistic ambitions, economic constraints, adaptation and resistance to the prevailing patriarchal social structures. In their role as feminist pioneers, the protagonists are a great influence on the contemporary art scene and the self-understanding of younger artists today. With their voices and narratives, they become collaborators passing on feminist thinking and artistic experiences.
Nov 2018
Sitting on her bed, Kurdwin Ayub wears a babydoll and hugs a blanket in her arms. She speaks to the camera as if addressing her ex-boyfriend. How to react to his eyes staring at us?
Mar 2012
Aino is celebrating her bachelorette party. Toni, who was once briefly with Aino, works at the gas station. Lolly has moved away, but always has sex with Aino's mother whenever she returns to her hometown.
Aug 2025
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
Experimental filmmaker Selma Doborac presents a radical and uncompromising essay on the impossibility of depicting the atrocities of war through insightful subtitles and meditative footage of abandoned structures that belong to the present as well as to the past.
Mar 2016
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
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
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
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
The first of Peter Tscherkassky's Cinemascope trilogy of short films is a fragmented glimpse of images pulsating with chaotic rhythm as they fight white margins for room in his palette. Mirrored frames being split by white margin and trying to reassemble again like the poles of a magnet, a train approaching station and colliding with itself in white-hot blistering chaos.
Oct 1999
Two actors in the roles of a soccer team's coach and assistant coach watch an "important" game. In many ways, "Wisla" is a highly successful excercise in the art of properly placed marks of elision.
Jan 1997