Austria

SYNOPSIS:
A film about news, life, love and death. Four days in Vienna, four days in world news.
At home children are born, the dead are washed, or people simply wait for the bus. At the same time television broadcasts very different images. A ferry sinks off the Philippines, Sadam Hussein decorates his soldiers with medals, and in Vienna a war breaks out that in reality never took place. With news reports from: Argentina, Austria, China, Cuba, Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Irak, Italy, Japan, Libya, Luxemburg, Monaco, Poland, Senegal, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Syria, West Germany, USA, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Zambia.Read More »

With Wollner’s latest film, The Trouble with Being Born, having generated a lot of interest and controversy (just last week, it was dropped from the Melbourne International Film Festival program after a newspaper article denounced it as dangerous), here’s her little-seen debut feature, about a thirteen-year-old girl in 1950s Vienna documenting her family and herself with a handheld video camera.Read More »

The film deals with the story of my grandfather, who was an SS officer. He died in 1999, when I was 29 – and I really loved him… Barbara AlbertRead More »

In 24/70 Western, recognition of the image being filmed (an anti-war poster picturing the My Lai massacre entitled And Babies) is withheld, through close-up filming of the surface of the image, never stepping back to reveal the whole. The method in this film (as in 20/68 Schatzi) acts to subvert the quick responses of viewers to such loaded imagery. In all of Kren’s films, the images are variously covered and uncovered, hidden and revealed, never taken for granted. – David Levi Strauss

Ritter, Dene, Voss is a stage play by Thomas Bernhard from 1986. After the Premiere the same year at the Salzburger Festspiele under the direction of Claus Peymann, the play was taken into the repertoire of the Burgtheater in Vienna.

It was named after the three actors that were to play the roles in the world-premiere: Ilse Ritter, Kirsten Dene and Gert Voss. Thomas Bernhard started off writing it with a note saying “Ritter, Dene, Voss. intelligent actors”.
The play was inspired by the family of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his (Wittgensteins) nephew Paul, who was a friend of Bernhard and protagonist of his novel “Wittgensteins Nephew” from 1982.Read More »

Der Theatermacher (“The Theatre Maker”) is a play by austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. It was released in 1984 and had its world-premiere the following year at the Salzburger Festspiele under Claus Peymann. Centered around main protagonist Bruscon, it is full with allusions to the famous festival in Salzburg.

During a break in his latest tour the actor Bruscon tries to stage his play „Das Rad der Geschichte“ (“The wheel of history”) in the small village Utzbach. He involves his whole family in the production as actors – wife, daughter and son.Read More »

Quote:
Despite the fact that, contrary to Bettauer’s book, the film is more a comedy rather than a real plea against antisemitism, and that it includes pretty negative archetypes against Jews, screenings of the film were actually subject to disturbances by NSDAP members. Furthermore Bettauer, who had not approved the changes made by Brelauer, was assassinated a few months later by a Nazi who, although accused as an “assassin”, had to spend only a few months in various mental hospitals and was released in 1927 without further requirements.Read More »

‘Vertigo Rush’ (Johann Lurf, 2007) starts with a slow and soundless Hitchcock zoom, but ends in a pulsating and electrically glowing mind fuck, which is as if Paul Sharits and Michael Snow had remade the last scene of Kubrick‘s ‘2001’.
International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2008Read More »

Quote:
When Irene gets a job as a hotel maid she soon finds out that the previous girl disappeared in mysterious circumstances.Read More »