Christof Schertenleib

Paradise: Love

On the beaches of Kenya they’re known as "Sugar Mamas" —European women who seek out African boys selling love to earn a living. Teresa, a 50-year-old Austrian and mother of a daughter entering puberty, travels to this vacation paradise, moving from beach to beach.

Paradise: Faith

For Anna Maria, paradise lies with Jesus, and she devotes her time to door-to-door missionary work. One day after years of absence, her husband, an Egyptian Muslim confined to a wheelchair, comes home—and soon prayers are replaced by fighting.

Dark Fortune

Late at night, the psychologist Eliane Hess is called to the hospital to take care of Yves, an eight-year-old boy, who just has lost his parents and siblings in a car accident. Eliane is both shocked and curiously drawn to the traumatized boy. As time goes by, she loses the professional distance to the patient, and when Yves' relatives begin a heavy dispute about the boy's future, Eliane makes an unorthodox decision, that throws her life off track.

Animal Love

In conurbations where hundreds of thousands live alongside one another, in the era of a highly technological society, in which communication has never played such a significant role, man has become lonely. Disappointed by his fellow human beings, he turns to animals. Dogs and other domestic animals serve him as companions, life partners, cuddly objects and bedfellows.

Women Without Men

Against the tumultuous backdrop of Iran's 1953 CIA-backed coup d'état, the destinies of four women converge in a beautiful orchard garden, where they find independence, solace and companionship.

Queer Glauben

She is a lesbian. She is a believer. And maybe soon a priest: Stefanie Arnold from Uri is on her way into the church ministry with her ordination as a deaconess, a vicariate year should give her certainty. But does she, as a lesbian woman living in a registered partnership, fit into an institution that has been dominated by patriarchal structures for centuries? And how do other people from the queer community fight for their place in the church?

Dog Days

Vignettes of the lives of several residents of a Vienna suburb during a heat wave.

Lovable Lies

Successful actress returns to her family home in rural Austria to visit her ailing father and her sister who spent her whole life taking care of him and her family. The reunion is marked by jealousy, introspection and a secret.

Exploited

Cheaters and cheated, wage dumping and moonlighting – up close and personal with the labor market inspectors Frédy, Regula, Marcos, Stefan and Chrümu.

Exit Oerlikon

When Hans looks back, he must say: That was a good life! He saw the world, loved his wife Martha and yes, two, three things went wrong. But that doesn't need to be talked about. And now? Two years ago Martha died, Hans can barely manage his daily routine anymore, and after a visit to the vet his beloved dog Miller doesn't return home. Hans is tired. Basically he can't be bothered anymore. He wants to die. But one doesn't talk about this. At best maybe with Willi, his friend. He trusts in him, he considers him as his ally, who should help him implement his plan...

Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation

Gaudi's Sagrada Familia has been continuously under construction since 1882.

Import/Export

A nurse from Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason. Both are looking for work, a new beginning, an existence, struggling to believe in themselves, to find a meaning in life...

Mountain Ride

After years of mass tourism in the Alps, a rethinking is slowly taking place. Whether researchers, artists or philosophers, many are trying to approach the essence of the mountains in new ways.

Paradise: Hope

Her mother in Kenya, 13-year-old Melanie spends her summer vacation at a strict diet camp set in the Austrian countryside. Between workouts and nutrition classes, pillow fights and first cigarettes, she falls in love with a doctor 40 years her senior.

There Was Nothing Here Before

A Swiss filmmaker of Palestinian origin travels to the West Bank to make sense of the break-up with a childhood friend who became a Jewish settler. While trying to understand why their friendship has not held up in the face of the political situation, he reveals his own tragic family history in Palestine.

Our Father

Toni, an attractive Catholic priest, impregnates several women in the Swiss countryside of the 1950s until the bishop revokes his priesthood. The six children only meet after Toni's funeral. They talk about their fatherless youth, their brave mothers and the fatal silence they now want to break.

War

Fifteen-year-old Matteo is attractive, albeit somewhat effeminate. The whole world is against him. He has no friends and his parents seem to live in a different universe. The pressure increases as his awkward attempts to win his father’s respect fail. One night two men carry him off: his parents send him to a remote alp, where he is forced to spend the summer working hard on a family farm. When Matteo arrives on the alp, a surprise awaits him.

Nathalie

Unopened reminders, mountains of debt, an uncertain future: single-parent cleaner Nathalie struggles through life to secure her livelihood and that of her children. She doesn't want pity or charity and certainly doesn't want to end up on welfare. Episodic and unembellished, the film portrays a woman living at subsistence level, in the middle of Switzerland, in our midst. A woman for whom giving up is not an option.

In the Basement

Filmmaker Ulrich Seidl explores of the dark underside of the human psyche by entering Austrian basements fitted out as private domains for secrets and fetishes.

Safari

Africa. In the wild expanses, where bush-bucks, impalas, zebras, gnus and other creatures graze by the thousands, they are on holiday. German and Austrian hunting tourists drive through the bush, lie in wait, stalk their prey. They shoot, sob with excitement and pose before the animals they have bagged. A vacation movie about killing, a movie about human nature.

Models

A revealing and devastating portrait of a trio of aspiring real-life Viennese models. Vivian will stop at nothing to be a magazine cover girl. Lisa fills her time with routine plastic surgery and cocaine binges, while innocent Tanja focuses on the mystical through tarot cards, yoga, and raw animal energy.

Margreet Honig – True Singing

Margreet Honig, eighty-four years old, is an internationally sought-after Dutch singing teacher. She teaches all over Europe and works with world-famous singers. She has developed her very own way of working.

Slumming

Two yuppies play mean pranks on those around them until one joke has unexpected consequences.

Loss Is to Be Expected

Looks at two communities on either side of the Czech-Austrian border. There's an elderly man in Austria looking for a new wife, and he meets a lone single woman on the Czech side of the border.

Die Schweizer