Dieter Pichler

The film "Favoriten" accompanies schoolchildren from a so-called "Brennpunkt"-school in Vienna-Favoriten through the third grade of elementary school, which will determine their future education.

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.

Fei works illegally as a hustler in order to support his family, yet when he realizes they are willing to accept his money but not his way of life, there is a major breakdown in their relations. Through his relationship to the headstrong Long, Fei seems able to find a new lease on life, but then he encounters Xiaolai, the love of his youth, who confronts him with the guilt of his repressed past.

Follows filmmaker and actress, Maryam Zaree, on her quest to find out the violent circumstances surrounding her birth inside one of the most notorious political prisons in the world.

Anya and Seryozha, eighteen and nineteen years old, have been close friends since school. They live in Mariupol, an industrial city in southeastern Ukraine. The film shows snapshots from the life of young people searching for who they want to be and how they want to live. They move between autonomy and uncertainty, rebellion and melancholy. They are full of imagination and willpower.

Ruth Beckermann documents the process of uncovering former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s wartime past. It shows the swift succession of new allegations by the World Jewish Congress during his Austrian presidential campaign, the denial by the Austrian political class, the outbreak of anti-Semitism and patriotism, which finally led to his election.

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.

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.

Introduced with a quote that invents its own creator, someone is dancing in a figure skating costume to a piece of music that conceals its source.

Initially, there's that moment of happiness: an African-American celebrating in Harlem cheers "We're free!" as if Barack Obama's victory meant the ultimate end of slavery. AMERICAN PASSAGES is an associative journey through the United States: a disillusioned Iraq veteran, gay adoptive fathers, black judges, white party animals and a pimp at a casino table in Las Vegas. The extreme contrasts of black and white, rich and poor, winners and losers are often as surprising as the meaning of the constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness in these times of crisis. An epic panorama of America.

This may be the last journey of Domagali, Amina and Hanne and their Toubou women's caravan in the Sahara. Each fall, armed with daggers, they leave the men behind and cross the desert to sell dates in Agadez to bring back the means to survive in the village for another year. This economic responsibility gives them a special position in their society. Yet, the increasing market pressure endangers their 'business'. How will their social status change

Four 12-year-olds—Sharon, Tom, Moishy, and Sophie—prepare for their bar or bat mitzvot.

Marc Aurel-Straße in Vienna: The last surviving Jewish textile merchant in the former textile district, the Iranian hotel proprietor and the Café Salzgries and its regulars. Between the summer of 1999 and spring 2000, Ruth Beckermann undertook a series of small journeys on and around her own doorstep and investigated her local area with the help of a film crew. This documentary film also gives an insight into the political changes when a far right Party joined the Government coalition in Austria.