MAZY-systems of transitions

It’s not uncommon for a film to have a moving love story at its core. Yet this particular set-up is unusual. The lovers here are Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, both important representatives of post-war German-language poetry. The story of the relationship between the Austrian and the Jew from Czernowitz is told through their nearly 20-year correspondence (1948–1967). Or, more precisely, by a young woman and a young man reading from their letters in a studio in Vienna’s venerable Funkhaus.

Air raid bunkers represent the architecturally intact remains of World War II. The film looks into their ideological as well as their material texture and puts them into the context of the urban infrastructure of the nineties.

"Cosmodrome" (= Launch pad for space rockets) is a film about the connection between cinema and cosmos. A revolving globe; the distribution logo of the Universal film studio shows the viewer an act of "initiation" taking place in the cosmos - a key image between cinema architecture and cinematic space.

An experimental study about the love between Franz Kafka and his adored Felice based on their correspondence.

Nine persons sign up for a self-awareness course at an isolated country estate. Dr. Romero, a charismatic therapist, and his assistants confront the patients with their problems. Cut off from the rest of the world, the participants are increasingly drawn into the therapy's spell.

"The Bathers" lets a woman happily bathing in a swimming pool disappear into the decomposing grains of the holiday film.

An audition for men aged between 16 and 99. There are no props nor make-up, just pure improvisation. All that is required is the willingness to engage openly with the topic and language of the words on the page. No small challenge, since the text in question is the scandalous novel published anonymously in 1906 “Josefine Mutzenbacher, or the Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself” which, as this film confirms, continues to be the subject of passionate and controversial discussions about desire, even today. What might be world-class pornographic literature for some is seen by others as an abusive depiction of child sexuality.

Rain on a window pane, a fire truck, a tomcat with innumerable offspring: it is an intentionally unintentional gaze that allows for chance encounters, for stories and memories - leads that Ruth Beckermann follows across Europe and the Mediterranean. Nigerian asylum seekers in Sicily, an Arab musician in Galilee, nationalists drunk on beer in Vienna, the Capitoline Wolf, and three veiled young women trying for minutes to cross a busy road in Alexandria. Threads, cloth and textiles pop up like book marks in a fabric of movement, of traveling or seeking refuge.

Favoriten is one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods in Vienna and the starting point of Ruth Beckermann’s latest documentary, in which she accompanies a class of pupils from the age of seven to ten. Their ambitious teacher, Ilkay, is determined to create an inclusive, supportive and safe environment for the kids. The majority of children don’t speak German at home, some families are wounded by war experience and many face discrimination. Despite few resources from the educational system, Ilkay gently navigates her class through daily adventures, defeats and victories. The result is an astonishingly cheerful portrait of a small community mirroring the complexities of contemporary European society. The film is an ode to childhood, celebrating the work of educators and lifelong learning in and outside the classroom.

A few hours in the life of empress Sisi; a summer night at Gödöllö. A game with operetta and melodrama; a grotesque with much colour, music, dancing, and bloodshed.

Based on Samuel R. Delany’s short novel ‘Aye, and Gomorrah...’, where the sci-fi premise of radiation-resistant state-neutered space travellers allows the author to explore androgyny, sexual identity, etc. Hammel uses Delany’s story to create a spookily beautiful world where asexual bodies live in the contradiction between their unarousable loneliness and desire for intimacy and contact.

The Lovers is the second part of a small trilogy, dealing with the extinction of memories. In the first part, The Bathers, the two protagonists were subject to the chemical decomposition of the film material. The Lovers, on the other hand, transforms an old Super8 porn film into both a tragic love story and a horror movie, and finally into a memory, that is being destroyed in the inner world. (Viennale 04)

This classic motif of a still life is followed by a home movie from the 1960s: A man and a woman are eating and drinking?a normal everyday activity, though there is nothing natural about it. Their movements are slowed down, the gloomy soundtrack accompanying these scenes implies a threat in the near future.

Rather than focusing on the monuments and representational architecture of the Plaza, Tlatelolco concentrates on the neighboring residential high-rises. Built in the 1960s under the supervision of modernist Mario Pani, Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco is the largest apartment complex in Mexico City. Realized at the zenith of Mexico’s economic boom, Pani’s vision of a “vertical city” beyond class distinctions has itself been shaken up on multiple occasions. Schreiber and cameraman Johannes Hammel capture the fading of an urban architectural utopia.

During the preparations for its 100th anniversary, the Chamber of Labor is accompanied and proves to be a unique contact point for the many people fighting for their rights.