Mara Mattuschka

Mara Mattuschka's experimental film lures the viewer into a singular. powerfully illustrated and colourful picaresque world. Gucki, the landlady's daughter, has never forgotten this place of carnal pleasures and reconstructs her vision of spiritual and bodily devotion through observations of theatrical practise. QVID TVM is an excessively existential parable about the myriad crossing of paths between people - from humiliation to punishment, fulfillment to bliss.

Five people who are in a show at a bar, who live in this hotel and have very different relationships with one another. After the show – they are already sleeping – they are woken by Pan for the night and therefore wake up to the destruction that is held within them.

In this film, Mattuschka works exclusively with animation. The cheerful cartoon characters Mimi and Max have a bit of a childlike-bisexuality to them, even when the subject seems to be the desire for and the differences from the other sex: "Look at what I´ve got here," says Mimi when she lifts up her skirt, the reply she gets being, "Is that real...?".

Phaidros is based on Plato's eponymous dialogue and plays in an LBQT+ milieu of a present-day metropolis. The actor Emil is meant to embody the character of the poet Phaedrus in a battle of words with Werner Maria, who slips into the role of Socrates. When the borders between friendship and sexual initiation soon blur beyond the events on stage, too, the shrill, carnivalesque scenario turns into grotesque love triangles and quadrangles, which ultimately even cause a casualty.

A short film by the German experimental filmmaker Michael Brynntrup from 1993. The film describes a surrealistic and absurd cycle of activities in a hermetically sealed cemetery from which the actors cannot break out.

We enter a constructed setting, against the background of a video wall that suggests we are in a restaurant. A Japanese restaurant, as can be concluded from the conveyor belt which forms part of the fittings. Running Sushi consists of a casual conversation between Steffi and Johnny in a sushi restaurant, while the parallel world of thoughts and sensations of both characters takes the stage. Each new dish has major consequences in the grotesque dream reality.

A body junkie: man must lay bare his hidden ingredients, dismantle his body, his integrity, his presence, and his identity in order to create a challenge both physical and metaphysical.

On the 28th of October 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber, candidate of the National Liberal Party in Chemnitz, suffered a heavy defeat at the elections of the German Reichstag. He was taken up in the mental clinic of the Leipzig University soon afterwards. To his rehabilition he wrote an extensive piece of work, "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken" (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), which was published in 1903 and led to his temporary dismissal. Hereby Schreber became the most quoted psychiatric patient in scientific literature. The third part was realized by Peter Tscherkassy based on a concept by Ernst Schmidt Jr.

"Disobedience" - tells of the loss of illusions and utopias. Growing up in a Viennese family, marked by the father's vivacious dominance and public fame as editor-in-chief of the 'press', as well as by the mother's puzzling grief for husband and children, Terese seeks another life and joins the commune of action artist Otto Mühl. However, the initially seemingly free love and life experiment fails increasingly.

Mimi Minus on the escalator of horror. Mara Mattuschka´s alter ego once again sets off on a tour de force of physical renunciation. First she goes into a tumble when the ground is pulled out from under her feet. Caught in a weightless space, she undergoes a strange metamorphosis. Mimi´s body is subjected to unnatural forces and gradually deforms, her skin ruptures and - as if the human shell were only an intermediate stage in the process of evolution - is shed like a cocoon; a reptilian monster emerges.

A woman in a hall of mirrors on the Vienna Prater.

A despotic youth spends his vacation oppressing the peaceful inhabitants of an island with his evil fantasies.

Without any kind of warning or introduction, the Queen of the Night's aria explodes rock music of its time. The famous coloratura parts are as ecstatic as a sung orgasm. The Queen of the Night sings women's names: She is all women, she addresses them all by name. A call and an appeal. Like a hurricane, a night owl, a sexual diva, she flies toward the camera before a starry night sky with a full moon. – M.M.

In the experimental short film PART TIME HEROES film artists Mara Mattuschka and Chris Haring stage a ballet of vanities with retro flair. The search for fame elevator goes up and down and egos bust and boom. Each character is isolated in an anachronistic, film-star dressing room, left alone, subjected to sinister fittings. The golden room with the greatest striptease talent who constantly undresses yet is never naked... The film checks these beings, isolated through their hero competition, into the lonely heart hotel where they eavesdrop on one another through thin walls.

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.

Autobiographical notes about bringing up children. A birth, the bite in the umbilical cord, a baby between sheets of music. Mimi fiddles educationally on a violin without strings, offers her breast and enjoys the little king with an improvised hysterical performance, and suddenly starts with Dadaistic oracles, letting the blead dance and carrying the child out into big wide world.

The world as a plaything for a giantess from outer space. A Godzilla-imitation on the way to herself: the giantess from outer space in the streets of a big city, fooling around, producing destruction, copulating with the Eiffel Tower. An orchestra of big feelings, the melodrama, defamed in infantile sounds and absurd costume, in make-up-persiflage and grotesque body-art-performances.

Opera countertenor Alex Gottfarb is not alone – his inner self is crowded. Some other personae live within him – shy Alexander, sexy Sandra, teenager Lex and a seven-year-old prodigy Xandi. Each one of them has different ideas of what life should look like and yet they are all extremely dependent on each other. With the help of Helene, who loves him, Alex succeeds to get in touch with his cohabitants. Cascades of turbulent events and tragicomic misunderstandings accompany Alex’ struggle for identity, love and freedom.