Michael Palm
Widerstandsmomente (Moments of Resistance) carries voices, writings, and objects from the anti-Nazi resistance into the present. Politically engaged women of today respond to historical resistance and make links to current events. A line is drawn from what was before and what is today to what might be: a society based on solidarity without discrimination or exclusion.
Tourism is booming at the Pension Alpenrose. After a dying in an accident, Karin returns as one of the undead. In a cinema owned by a Nazi widow where the past is mourned, she brings the dead back to life.
The images could be taken from a science fiction film set on planet Earth after it’s become uninhabitable. Abandoned buildings – housing estates, shops, cinemas, hospitals, offices, schools, a library, amusement parks and prisons. Places and areas being reclaimed by nature, such as a moss-covered bar with ferns growing between the stools, a still stocked soft drinks machine now covered with vegetation, an overgrown rubbish dump, or tanks in the forest. Tall grass sprouts from cracks in the asphalt. Birds circle in the dome of a decommissioned reactor, a gust of wind makes window blinds clatter or scraps of paper float around, the noise of the rain: sounds entirely without words, plenty of room for contemplation. All these locations carry the traces of erstwhile human existence and bear witness to a civilisation that brought forth architecture, art, the entertainment industry, technologies, ideologies, wars and environmental disasters.
The “digital revolution” reached the cinema late and was chiefly styled as a technological advancement. Today, in an era where analog celluloid strips are disappearing, and given the diversity of digital moving picture formats, there is much more at stake: Are the world’s film archives on the brink of a dark age? Are we facing the massive loss of collective audiovisual memory? Is film dying, or just changing? CINEMA FUTURES travels to international locations and, together with renowned filmmakers, museum curators, historians and engineers, dramatizes the future of film and the cinema in the age of digital moving pictures.
In the heat of the summer lays a lonesome house in the countryside where nine year old twin brothers await their mother’s return. When she comes home, bandaged after cosmetic surgery, nothing is like before and the children start to doubt whether this woman is actually who she says she is.
"Low Definition Control is a film about images. Surveillance cameras, ultrasound detectors and MRI images in medicine are fabricating models of conformist behaviour and healthy bodies but as well of anomalies, suspicion and hidden risks. In times of terrorist threat, risk prevention and all-embracing control phantasms these images foreshadow a possible future. A film about this future." ~ Austrian Film Commission
At some point in the not-so-distant future, an unnamed European city has evolved into a bizarre dystopian metropolis, whose residents inhabit towering utopian high-rises and work, collectively, in a single compound.
Documentary of B-movie filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer that focuses on his low budget pictures.
Since 1952 countless films, documentaries, and reports have been made about Miková, the small village in Eastern Slovakia with a population of one hundred and fifty from where Andy Warhol’s family emigrated to the US. Focussing on his relatives who still live there, I Am From Nowhere examines the media’s obsession with Miková, thus reflecting on fame, filming as well as being filmed, and on Warhol’s legendary “15 minutes of fame”. More than that however, it is a film about the dreams and hopes of the people there, about the universal human dream of a better life, and an “American Dream”, which turns out to be completely different than expected.
"Ceija Stojka" is a portrait of 64-year-old Austrian Rom Ceija Stojka, who, after a nomadic childhood, settled in Vienna many years ago. In the recent past, Ceija Stojka’s fame as an author, painter and singer has spread outside Austria. She represents the opening of Rom and Sinti society to the world of the "gadje." This process and all the difficulties it involves is unique in the history of the Rom in Central Europe. The central theme of this documentary is the fusion of two extremely different worlds in this fascinating woman. Beginning with Ceija Stojka’s present life, her biography is reconstructed in this film portrait. At the same time, a critical chronology of images portrays the common associations with the "gypsy," examples of which pervade Ceija Stojka’s life. A comprehensive consideration of the gypsy’s image, from romanticized projections to images of exclusion, discrimination and destruction, and finally the present ambivalent relationship between Rom and non-Rom.
Albania, 1994. Those who have left assert that those who remain are the ones who are afraid. Those who remain say, what do we have to fear? We have no time for tears.
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.
In the beginning is the sea. Night over the harbour. Then a plane takes off. Dana, the friend, leaves the airport building. Dana, the milliner, leaves the millinery. Dana, the traveller, sits in the train.
A permanent disposal site is being sought for toxic waste, and a protest movement develops. A film crew travels through Lower Austria to find out the real implications of the contamination we read about every day in our newspapers.
A vampire pretender who is murdering women runs into a real vampire who is out to stop him because he is casting too much of a spotlight on the vampire community.
"Masculinity" is the subject of this film. Harald, the protagonist, fails in his blind attempt to prove his masculinity at Maria's expense. The Stone Age is over. Is it really?
"Studio Schönbrunn" is an ironic play with quotations. Paula Wessely in the Nazi-Wien-Film-production "Heimkehr", Leni Riefenstahl's biography, as well as Nestroy, Mozart, Marx, Frank Sinatra, Jandl. The text is adapted, de-familiarized and de-subjectivized. Consequently, the leading actor shoots the film's author.
