MappaMundi

The Happiness Machine is a cinematic performance comprised of animated films, musical compositions and testimonials. Ten women filmmakers, ten women composers and ten musicians present Christian Felber's Common Good Economy for discussion.

Philipp Jedicke’s second feature documentary presents itself as a cineast eulogy for the Viennese pop scene as a curious and heterogeneous bunch with an extremely idiosyncratic radiance.

Roya, an Iranian teacher imprisoned in Tehran’s Evin Prison for her political beliefs, is faced with a choice: make a forced televised confession or remain confined to her three-square-metre cell. As past and present slip out of sequence and exchange places, she moves between inner landscapes and lived experience.

Charlie and Tom have been a couple for fifteen years. Now in their thirties, they want to take the next step and get married - and get cold feet: What if they later regret never having lived it up? A story about the challenges of love in a world where one click is enough to reshuffle the cards.

Lebanon, 1982. To keep a promise made to an old friend, Georges, an idealistic theater director, travels to Beirut for a project as utopian as it is risky: to stage the play Antigone on the front line, in order to steal a moment of peace from the raging civil war. The characters will be played by actors from different political and religious camps. Lost in a city and a conflict he knows nothing about, Georges is guided by Marwan. As fighting resumes, everything is soon called into question, and Georges, who falls in love with Imane, has to face up to the reality of war.

A journey along Europe’s most spectacular night train routes, uncovering hidden natural stories along the way — stories of landscapes, wildlife, and the ecosystems that shape them.We meet people on board and along the routes. What unites them is a special connection to nature. Traveling through the night and into the early hours of morning, our routes take us across Germany, Scandinavia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, and almost the entire Balkan Peninsula, all the way to the outskirts of Istanbul.

A portrait of the genius that shook the world with her discovery of “the banality of evil.” After she attends the Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Arendt dares to write about the Holocaust in terms no one has ever heard before. Her work instantly provokes a furious scandal, and Arendt stands strong as she is attacked by friends and foes alike. But as the German-Jewish émigré also struggles to suppress her own painful associations with the past, the film exposes her beguiling blend of arrogance and vulnerability — revealing a soul defined and derailed by exile.

Bits of found film and different types of animation illustrate a classic chase scene scenario: A woman is abducted and a man comes to her rescue, but during their escape they find themselves in the enemy's secret headquarters.

Vienna, Austria, 1910. The young painter Egon Schiele is a rising artist, provocative and free, whose work, characterized by eroticism, shocks as much as it fascinates art lovers.

Heinrich wishes to conquer death through love, and when he meets Henriette, the wife of a business acquaintance, she expresses interest in a suicide pact when she learns she has a terminal illness.

Maryam accidentally killed her husband Nasser and is sentenced to death. The only person who can save her is Mona, Nasser's daughter. All Mona has to do is appear on a TV show and forgive Maryam. But forgiveness proves difficult when they are forced to relive the past.

Jewish aesthete Cioma, 21, does not let anyone take away his joy of life, especially not the Nazis. In 1942, he has to find new ways to make his living in Berlin and escape deportation. In the process he discovers his talent for forgery: not only with passports, but also his own identity.

When Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch meet for the first time in Paris in the summer of 1958, they are already international celebrities of the literary world. In the four years that follow, they dabble in great love and an open relationship between his hometown of Zurich and her adopted Rome.

Vienna, 1920. The Austro-Hungarian Empire has collapsed. Peter Perg returns home from the Great War, after years of captivity. But the Vienna he comes home to is nothing like the place he once knew. The new Austrian Republic thrives on social and artistic freedom, but anti-democratic movements and unemployment loom overhead. A stranger in his hometown, his life takes a turn for the worse when one of his former comrades is murdered. Suddenly the mysterious killings of veterans are mounting. Personally connected to the victims, Perg decides to bring the killer to justice. He finds an ally in the cool-headed forensic doctor Theresa Körner, with whom he has a deeper, shared history. Their investigation leads them into the darkest corners of the city, as they confront a brutal and systematic killer and intrigues from within the police force. But when the killer’s net closes around Perg himself, he faces the moral dilemma of his life.

Tarika lives with her father and her grandmother in a small hut near the border far away from the local village. Marked by her “butterfly wings”, a rare bone condition she inherited from her mother, the girl has been the source of the community’s superstition forever. When the local cattle is struck down by a mysterious disease, fear starts spreading among the villagers...

Alone in a secluded mansion, Giacomo Casanova cries out then collapses. When the mysterious and beautiful writer, Elisa von der Recke, comes to visit, it breathes new life into the old man. A movie that captures the myth of the greatest seducer of all times, Casanova, his story is told both through fiction and on-stage opera performances that unravel the tale of his adventures, his passions, and ultimately his fear of death.