Focus on Infinity

“What the hell happened to my country?” After Donald Trump’s election, this is a burning question for Susanne Brandstätter, an American filmmaker who’s lived most her life in Austria. With the critical distance of a European and an insider’s eye, she gets close to Trump voters in Ohio: a microcosm of a deeply divided USA. Showing striking parallels to Europe, the documentary explores polarization and why people stick to their political opinions – no matter what. Is there no way out?

Documentary on the life and work of B-movie filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer, spanning from his early life to his last film.

Analog celluloid strips are disappearing. Is film dying, or just changing? Are the world's film archives on the brink of a dark age? Renowned filmmakers, museum curators, historians, and engineers help dramatize the future of film and the cinema in the age of digital moving pictures.

This feature documentary portrays one of the most important museums in the world, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. It presents a unique look behind the scenes of this fascinating institution and encounters a number of charismatic protagonists and their working fields unfolding the museum’s special world – as an art institution as well a vehicle for state representation.

At the Natural History Museum in Vienna, everything that is found on earth and in outer space and that humans can get their hands on, is collected, archived, and studied in the name of evolutionary research. Archiv der Zukunft captures the aesthetic appeal of the natural-history collection and its working process, illuminating the mammoth project of knowledge preservation and production hidden behind the building’s imperial façade.

An environmental spy infiltrates the global syndicate for illegal timber trading. With the aid of a hidden camera he documents the chain of illegal activities, from harvesting of the wood to the marketing of “washed” products in supermarkets. This turns out to be an excellent motor for political change.

A mysterious Being in a near future investigates a world devoid of human life and determines to unravel what led to the elimination of almost all lifeforms by using voice recordings they retrieved from the past – interviews made by filmmaker Susanne Brandstätter with prominent international experts and scientists before the elimination events. Each interview discloses new clues indicating what led to the deterioration of the environment, to the biosphere, to crops and finally to the extinction of humankind. Yet though Hungry’s visuals show a possible and grim future, the interviews deliver a positive argument for action: this vicious cycle can be broken before it’s too late.

Ecological interdependence, co-creation, resilience and collaboration in nature – these are the topics dealt with in this documentary film, viewed against the backdrop of our increasingly threatened environment. Beyond the poles of nostalgia and techno-futurism, the film’s impressive images provide an insight into natural processes and systems. Dead forest in Central Europe is becoming living forest again. Floating beds in Bangladesh are taking on climate change. In the dunes of China’s desert regions, thousands of people are working on the largest renaturalisation project in the world. In the Danube Delta between Romania and Ukraine, old dams from the Soviet era are being dismantled so that a European wetland can once again become a biodiverse natural landscape. Nature as a role model and a potential game changer for future-oriented, innovative adaptation strategies? This film highlights some successful approaches to tackling our current ecological challenges.

A bittersweet relationship film about love, work and the daily struggle for happiness.

As times get tougher in the Arab world, people reminisce about the greatest diva of all time: Asmahan. Today, many Arabs go to Vienna in search of the dream that was whispered to them. But things are not that simple. Singer and actress Asmahan is a Syrian princess who emigrated to Egypt in the 1920s and where she enjoyed a career in show business, eventually becoming an Egyptian Diva.

The desert city of Agadez in Niger has been a hub of trade routes since time immemorial. The local Tuareg population always earned a good living by transporting goods and people across the Sahara. But Agadez is also a place where migrants pass through on their way to Europe.

Since the 1980s, Elfie Semotan, born in Upper Austria, has been one of the most sought-after and also idiosyncratic fashion photographers in the world. For more than half a century the now 77-year-old Semotan has been successful at the intersection between art, fashion and commercial photography, with many of her sophisticated arrangements having become legendary. Semotan's sometimes controversial oeuvre is characterized by her strong personality and a continuous opposition to anything mainstream. Elfie Semotan, Photographer is an hommage not only to a great artist but also to the passion of photography itself.

An Austrian documentary about the public employment service and its clients.

Against the background of current Austrian politics, the film reconstructs the history of the Carinthian minority conflict. The focus of this documentary is the eventful 1970s, when a young generation of Carinthia's Slovenes took up the fight for their rights laid down in Austria's State Treaty of 1955. With Haider as provincial governor, it is a fight fought until today.