Bianca, a young woman living in the Austrian province of Burgenland, is a mystery. She is a passionate runner, but when she walks her legs fail. She is a highly talented painter, who keeps sketching photorealistic images of herself that show her pierced, nailed, cut, in flowing robes, or tied to her running shoes. She talks about her diseases, the collapses happening at shorter and shorter intervals, and her passion for collecting dead animals, always with a smile on her ageless face.
The photographer and filmmaker Tina Bara respects her protagonist’s cocoon. She lets the paintings speak, which show cruel signs of self-destruction and self-hatred, screaming out for someone to probe the causes of this. At the same time, “Bianca Is Running” is a very quiet film whose strength lies in uncertainty. The director turns this cautious, gradual approach and her own doubts into the dramatic principle of her debut film, creating a structure that is open to interpretation. The encounters with Bianca take us into uncertain territory – neither she nor the film offer any footholds.

Cornelia Klauß

“When I look for inspiration or an entry into high society, I read the phone book …” Austrian-American songwriter and comedian Georg Kreisler’s cult song as an animated music video.

In 1919, Lev Termen aka Léon Theremin invented an electronic musical instrument played without touching it, by moving one’s hands very precisely in an electrostatic field between two antennae. It looks like magic, it sounds like magic. When the inventor himself speaks up in a 1973 interview, though, you realise that many of the electronic miracles of music were nothing but by-products of the military industry. “Elektro Moskva” is an essay about the Soviet history of electrification, the unshakeable belief in technological progress and the oddities created in the process. Rare archive material is juxtaposed with contemporary observations that not only enable us to look into the junk rooms of passionate instrument collectors but also to be present when the musician Richardas Norvilla, better known as Benzo, philosophises about the space sounds produced by his synthesizer, which he claims are as unpredictable as life in Russia, where listening to the Rolling Stones was once banned. Though nobody is likely to miss them amid these psychedelic sounds.

Claudia Lehmann

“How do you like me better? In the little box or en nature?” A shrill laugh. The question is asked by Omsch, a usually cheerful, often thoughtful and rarely moody person. “Grantig”, grumpy, they call it where she lives, in Vienna. It’s obvious that she used to be a “naughty girl” and “pretty as a picture” to boot. They all wanted to marry her, and she still thinks a lot about her appearance. She celebrates her 101st birthday during the production of this film which the well-travelled, Japanophile director and artist Edgar Honetschläger makes about her, himself and therefore their friendship. The 100 is erased, she starts again with the first candle.
It’s pure affirmation of life, carefully produced (from Pärt through Schubert to Morton Feldman), with comic passages (vitriolic harangues against the pope) and contemplative ones (for example reflecting about the new liberties of old age).
A few years after her death in 2009, the exceptional Austrian filmmaker, who was half her age and yet her soul mate and who has a fondness and talent for design and dosage, assembles the many small snapshots. In every second of this film, which was shot from the gut, as it were, you feel that both of them liked to live the moment rather than make a lot of words about “goals”. You don’t get this every day: dream cinema by and with extremely kind-hearted people to whom schmaltz is nevertheless an alien concept.

Barbara Wurm

In English, “trespass” means to intrude, but it could also be an unauthorized entry, or in legal jargon, a “domestic disturbance”. Paul Wenninger’s ten-minute real-animation film plays with all of these meanings in a technically impressive, varied, and precise tour de force.