State of the Nation

Set within a Viennese apartment block, this affectionate Austrian comedy makes fun of the strange habits of the famed city's residents. The building is located in a middle-class area and has residents from many age groups and walks of life. Many of the tenants are much older, but there are also a few children about. In one apartment lives a large group of Polish construction workers, while a Yugoslavian woman and her huge family attempt to survive in their tiny flat. The episodic story of the lives of these and other tenants is framed by a visit from a civil servant from the Office of Statistics.

More than two years after the sudden death of Michael Glawogger in April 2014, film editor Monika Willi realizes a film out of the film footage produced during 4 months and 19 days of shooting in the Balkans, Italy, Northwest and West Africa. A journey into the world to observe, listen and experience, the eye attentive, courageous and raw. Serendipity is the concept - in shooting as well as in editing the film.

The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.

Megacities is a documentary about the slums of five different metropolitan cities.

FRANKREICH WIR KOMMEN is a highly enjoyable documentary, obviously intended for TV, but showing at film festivals. It shows us the highlights of the 1998 World Cup Championships in France through the eyes of several interesting and diverse fans of the Austrian national team. Entertaining, even for those not interested in football.

Gangster boss Carlos orders the dodgy Viennese junkyard owner Harry to bring him a bag from Poland. Harry passes the order on to his "best man" Schorsch. Schorsch, not exactly the brightest, is currently without a driver's license and completely fixated on the 24-hour car race of Le Mans. So he gives the order to Mao and sends in their place the takeaway lessees Hans and Max to Poland. Their journey leads to a seemingly endless drug trip full of extraordinary phenomena.

A street in Oakland. Early morning hours. A motion. Music. A few sound bits. Someone paints the wall of a studio. Colors. Broken televisions. A street in Oakland. Early morning hours. A motion. Different music. Columbus. End.

Ever had an idea for a film? Ever actually visualised this film in your mind? Or even sketched out scenes and camera angles? Plenty of film buffs have. Michael Glawogger invited 12 people to talk about their ideas for a film and then shot short fragments for them. The result is a crime-story-erotic-lyrical-experimental-vampire-fantasy-horror-soap-opera-splatter-trash-road-movie-melodrama posing as a documentary!

For his friend and colleague Michael Glawogger (who directed the rest of the film), Ulrich Seidl contributed a series of existential documentary scenes from 1980's Vienna.

Twenty-eight well-known filmmakers living and working in Austria were invited by WIENER MOZARTJAHR 2006, to produce associative miniatures on Mozart. Requirement: they had to be one-minute artistic short films. The directors come from a whole range of different backgrounds, ranging from animated, experimental and short film to documentaries and feature films. The result is a multi-facetted sampler of diverse formal and contextual positions with regard to Mozart’s person and his influence on today’s society, art and culture. The contributions run the gamut from experimental-conceptual statements through socio-critical and documentary observations to pithy short feature films.

Three stories by three directors, three journeys into the world of teenagers and countercultures. The stories are interlaced with each other. Characters with a small performance in one story will play a major part in one of the other two stories so we will learn more about them, on the other hand central characters appear again in the periphery of one of the other stories. It is done in a casual way, comparable with the situation in daily life when two friends are running into each other by chance. Petra and Nicole in their shrill world of brightness. Loafing around, bumming and teasing guys.

18th century Vienna. Maria Theresia von Paradis, a gifted piano player and close friend of Mozart's, lost her eye-sight as a child. Desperate to cure their talented daughter, the Paradis entrust Maria to Dr. Mesmer, a forward-thinking-physician who gives her the care and attention that she requires. With the doctor's innovative techniques of magnetism, Maria slowly recovers her sight. But this miracle comes at a price as the woman progressively starts to lose her gift for music.

Following the death of Manu (Resetarits) in a car accident, the film relates the interwoven stories of several people who become indirectly connected by the events and aftermath of the crash.

Five former high school friends reunite for an evening of fun, remembrance and sadness in this Altmanesque portrait of female friendship. A look at how youthful idealism turns into adult pragmatism, and how one can fight such changes, from the director of Free Radicals.

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

The personal journey of young Sita is not only an expedition into her family's burdened past during World War 2. It is also a journey to the abyss of modern European society, a trip which takes her from Berlin to Romania via Vienna and Warsaw - about losing one's homeland and discovering oneself, about hope and responsibility.

Vienna, 1995. Jasmin, Tamara, Valentin, Senad and Roman live near the northern border of Austria. Their lives repeatedly intersect and drift apart. The characters involved are young migrants from the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland and Austria itself. Strangers in a strange land, they feel a sense of loss in their new, temporary environment. The five-some meet and get close to each other, hopelessly clinging to friendships and relationships with no future. They frequent cafés and train stations dreaming of a better tomorrow. Often, they just fall back on the prospect of short-term affection in yet another doomed romantic or sexual encounter. Trying hard to suppress the memories of war and alienation, they try to find moral strength and warmth through one another.

Four months after the end of the war, four young people from Sarajevo share their experience, their thoughts and their hopes for the future, walking around the city in ruin.

To evade the incomprehensible world of adults seven-year-old Natascha creates her own world, influenced by her impressions of sexuality and religion. It is a world of mainly catholic imaginations and symbols - a world between frightening bogey men and flying Christ children.

Two girls in the disco give free rein to anger, nobody stops them.

Hope, the third film in the PARADISE TRILOGY, tells the story of the 13-year-old Melanie. While her mother (Teresa) travels to Kenya, Melanie spends her holiday in the Austrian countryside at a strict diet camp for overweight teenagers. Under the supervision of a tattooed trainer and a creepy doctor, the teenagers attempt to do sports during the day and secretly get drunk in the evening. Between physical education and nutrition counseling, pillow fights and her first cigarette, Melanie falls in love with the doctor who is 40 years her senior.

In conurbations where hundreds of thousands live alongside one another, in the era of a highly technological society, in which communication has never played such a significant role, man has become lonely. Disappointed by his fellow human beings, he turns to animals. Dogs and other domestic animals serve him as companions, life partners, cuddly objects and bedfellows.

Six Catholics share their thoughts and problems with Jesus in different churches. The camera accompanies them.

A nurse from the Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason. Both are looking for work, a new beginning, an existence, struggling to believe in themselves, to find a meaning in life..

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

Two men, two brothers, their childhood home in Lower Austria. They drink to their late mother, they bury her. Then they drive back to their real lives. One back to Romania, to resume living his newly begun life, the other to Rimini, to go back to dreaming his old dream. But sooner or later both their pasts will catch up with them.

Main character of this movie is Rene Rupnik, a former math teacher. He is forty years old and lives together with his mother in a desolate block of flats. Ever since his early youth women with big breasts have fascinated him, because they symbolise a kind of earth mother to him. He has never had an especially close relationship with his own mother; she was too 'bony' for him. Object of Rene's fantasy is the actress Senta Berger, to him everything a woman should be. Standing by the blackboard and explaining the mathematical laws of sine and cosine ('sinus' is bosom in Latin), Rene sings the praises of the female curves and those of Santa Berger in particular. Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl let the former teacher speak freely about his obsessions and desires, intercutting his monologues with scenes from the protagonist's day-to-day life.

Looks at two communities on either side of the Czech - Austrian border. There's an elderly man in Austria looking for a new wife, and he meets a lone single woman on the Czech side of the border.

Disappointed by failed relationships and the demands set by local women, more and more Austrians search for happiness in a marriage with women from Thailand and the Philippines. Asked about the positive properties of their Asian spouses, the answer of the Austrian husbands quite often is, "They don't talk back." Protagonist of the film is Karl S., a teacher in Vienna in his forties. Following his failed marriage he is now seeking a durable partnership and is on the lookout for a wife who doesn't question her traditional role. His solution: a wife from the Far East. Karl S. rounds up experiences and visits several mixed couples to get a clearer picture and to have his idea proven right. The film accompanies him on his search for the ideal woman and gives an insight into the imagination of these "last real men" who at the beginning seem to have hit the jackpot with their decisions

Africa. In the wild expanses, where bush-bucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with excitement and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature.

Two stories about the greatest seducer of all time, Giacomo Casanova.

In 1976, Jack Unterweger was convicted for the murder of Margaret Schaefer and sentenced to life in prison. While imprisoned, he committed himself to reading and writing, eventually earning literary respect both inside and outside the penitentiary. In 1984, his autobiography "Fegefeuer" (Purgatory) became a bestseller.

A sophisticated hotel somewhere on the French coast. Silvia and Gustav meet here, they have recently split up after 19 years of marriage. But they know each other well, and a fight begins in which Silvia always seems one step ahead. So she quickly realizes that Gustav's new, younger girlfriend is already expecting a child from him. The secret meeting between Silvia and Gustav takes a new turn when Gustav suddenly finds out that the conference center in Toulouse, where he is allegedly staying, was blown up in a terrorist attack.

Mythological hero Scipio must choose between Fortune and Constancy in this superb 2006 Salzburg Festival production of Mozart's "Il Songo di Scipione," directed by Michael Sturminger and starring Blagoj Nacoski, Louise Fribo, Bernarda Bobro, Iain Paton, Robert Sellier and Anna Kovalko. The Chor des Stadttheaters Klagenfurt and the Kärntner Symphonieorchester, conducted by Robin Ticciati, provide accompaniment.

Ozren is raised in Vienna by his mother Silvija, who works as a prostitute, and his aunt and uncle. The film shows the demimonde of Vienna in the early 1990ies and deals with Ozren's finding out that his mother is not a waitress (as he was initially told) and with the way he copes with it.

Music film

A crazed dictator delivers a powerful monologue accompanied by the music of Bach, Franck, Widor, Messiaen and Ligeti. Recorded at Elbphilharmonie Concert Hall.