Vienna Calling delves into Vienna's music culture, far from mainstream. It's a unique blend of documentary and theatre, offering an eccentric panopticon.
In Vienna, Europe's faded music capital, an underground scene thrives, marked by the city's wryness and sombre romanticism. The camera explores Vienna's streets, bars, and dark corners, unearthing the music and charm of local artists hidden beneath the city's polished exterior. The film weaves musical performances into an eccentric mosaic, far from the mainstream. It transforms into a docu-musical showing the diverse face of the new Vienna. A poetic glimpse into a historic metropolis infusing tradition with a new spirit.
Weightless tells the story of Max' self-realisation in an environment not yet ready for it. What feels like an intimate conversation, reveals a lot about our society.
The essayistic documentary Weightless circles around the topics of identity, mental struggle and self-realisation. It does so through an intimate conversation with the protagonist, Max, about his rather complicated growing up. But Max himself is never shown in the images, which creates a special audio-visual language and unique dynamics of the spoken. The images of significant places charge the spoken with wider meaning and ambivalence.
Željko is the head of the union at the Gredelj railway car factory. His deputy, Mladen, committed suicide after a large public protests and clashes within the union. Željko is torn between the guilt he feels because of Mladen's death and the expectation of the workers to lead a strike.
In Jirkuff's animation, based on a story by Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016), the parts of a house develop a life of their own. Along with the handrail and the wallpaper, even the white drawing surfaces are affected: Jirkuff's charcoal strokes and the coal dust from Aichinger's text colour them grey (after all, coal is stored in the cellar where the narrating voice ultimately ends up). Here, as previously in Vermessung der Distanz (2019), Susi Jirkuff's interest is not only in the spatiality of the building but also in the (non-) behaviour of fellow humans. No one asks: “Didn't you live next door to us just yesterday?”
The story appeared in 1955 in Stillere Heimat, the literary yearbook of the city of Linz. Aichinger had survived the era of national socialist terror in an apartment near the Vienna Gestapo headquarters. The yearned end of the war did not promise liberation – the same people were sitting in the offices; they talked the same and acted the same. The housing office told the severely depleted family whose close family members had been murdered, a sister and an aunt able to flee to England: “Sleep in hammocks.” Who really cared about such matters back then? And who's really concerned about the living situation of endangered people nowadays? (Andreas Dittrich)
How to create a world of your own? Push back the limits of your imagination?
The Wonder Way is an exploration in search of extraordinary territories, terrestrial or celestial paradises, intriguing and uncharted. A journey out of time, seeking encounters with those who imagine other worlds within this world.
From Randlett King Lawrence's phantasmagoria to Charles Ross's astral sculpture Star Axis, through Jugnet+Clairet's enigmatic maps, Noah Purifoy's Desert Museum, Jean Wisniewski's Garden of Eden or Didier Queloz's first exoplanet, The Wonder Way takes us to the most striking universes and draws a new cartography of the world in a great breath of freedom and magic.
The Zimmerwald Conference – mired in legend in the Soviet Union and erased from history in Zimmerwald itself. A labyrinth of forgetting and remembering from which history is made.
When Lenin and Trotsky met in the small village of Zimmerwald, it was not to watch birds, contrary to what they claimed. The conference was a call to the workers of the world to unite against the war that was raging in Europe. This page of Switzerland's history has long been forgotten, but new generations, such as the ones portrayed in this film, are willing to recover it.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.