Pre TV

A mother figure idealized by the cinema, Empress Elisabeth of Austria did not flourish with her four children. What kind of mother was the rebellious Sissi?

During the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century, Andreas Hofer became a Tyrolean folk hero. As the head of a resistance movement, he became caught up in a dangerous political game of interests between the French and Austrians, Napoleon and the Habsburgs. After the defeat at Austerlitz, the Habsburgs had to cede Tyrol to the Bavarian kings in 1805. The liberal Bavarians implemented numerous reforms in Tyrol, including religious reforms, which met with resistance from the rural population. The young Archduke Johann wanted to take advantage of their discontent. In Andreas Hofer, the commander-in-chief of the Tyrolean troops, the brother of Emperor Franz I finds a loyal patriot whom he can use for his political moves. The Tyrolean revolt against the French and Bavarians puts Napoleon in a tight spot. In several battles, the rebels succeed in defeating the Bavarian and French troops, but not in defeating them for good.

The film chronicles the story of how the Nazis and the IOC turned, to their mutual benefit, a small sports event into the modern Olympics. The grand themes and controversial issues from the 1936 Games have continued to this day: Monumentality, budget overruns, collusion with authoritarian regimes, corruption and sometimes even bribery.

More than 40 million years ago, Sardinia broke away from Europe’s southern rim and began drifting towards Africa. Along its eventful voyage, this gigantic vessel of stone picked up a rich variety of passengers from the surrounding land and sea. During a fascinating journey through time, the film takes the viewers on a guided tour of this great ship, from the highest point that scrapes the Mediterranean sky to the dark cavities of its hold, and into the submarine world that surrounds its hull. Today, Sardinia’s rugged mountains, gigantic caves, wind-swept plateaus, ancient forests, and azure waters boast an overwhelming diversity of plants, animals and civilizations – a result of the ancient journey that brought the whole variety of the Mediterranean together on a single island at its very center.

In 1924, British climber George Mallory and his partner Andrew Irvine attempted to conquer Everest for the third time. They never returned. Could they have been the first to successfully climb the mountain before meeting their deaths? In 1999, German geologist Jochen Hemmleb discovered Mallory's body just below the summit, reigniting speculation. In 2010, he organized a new expedition to follow up on this sensational discovery. His goal: to find the base camp from which Mallory and Irvine set out to conquer the summit.

The film shows how strong women took up the fight against social injustice and for their own rights and how the uprising of 1525 changed people's lives.

The focus of this documentary film, originally titled Speaking in Tongues: . The Unspeakable Speaking. Glossolalia among Natives, Christians, as an Emergency Language and Poetic Experiment, was the Pentecostal movement in America. The 45-minute video documentary, which was broadcast on Austrian television under the title The Unspeakable Speaking, used glossolalia to examine speech without apparent meaning. By examining speech defects, literary texts and the babbling of babies, forms of articulation for which normal linguistic logic plays no role were explored. The focus, which is beyond moral judgment, lies on various forms of expression and other, possible approaches and representations of reality.