Joerg Burger

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

“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?

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.

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.

The “digital revolution” reached the cinema late and was chiefly styled as a technological advancement. Today, in an era where analog celluloid strips are disappearing, and given the diversity of digital moving picture formats, there is much more at stake: Are the world’s film archives on the brink of a dark age? Are we facing the massive loss of collective audiovisual memory? Is film dying, or just changing? CINEMA FUTURES travels to international locations and, together with renowned filmmakers, museum curators, historians and engineers, dramatizes the future of film and the cinema in the age of digital moving pictures.

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.

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.

Focus On Infinity is a cinematic journey to the places, people and machines that are involved in exploring the origin of our cosmos and of our existence. It is a very personal and intuitive investigation into the roots and boundaries of our imagination dominated by sensual perception. Not unlike an adventure, the film dares to voyage into the unknown, to the structures of our intellectual capacity and drive to explore. It focuses on the restlessness that characterizes the natural sciences, which drives research with increasing technological advancement and financial resources, and underpins the never-ending human ambition to fully understand our world.

Documentary about a religious event in southern Italy.

Documentary about a religious event in southern Italy.

A tribute to a humble but great man in the film industry.

A tribute to a humble but great man in the film industry.

A tribute to a humble but great man in the film industry.

A documentary on the restoration of Dziga Vertov's Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa (1931).

In 1942 Anna and Wasyl Major were sent from Galicia to Lungau and forced to work on farms. Only after the war's end brother and sister heard from each other. Both are staying in Austria and hard work on other people's farms still shapes their life.

Shifting between a suburban hostelry, domestic harmony and the idyllic setting of the Prater funfair, Johannes Holzhausen's documentation is a respectful and sympathetic observation of the long-term relationship between two people leading an unspectacular existence on the edge of society. A retrospective view of an unhappy life from the perspective of happier times.