Austrian Cultural Forum

Like the flicker of silent films or the delay of memory recall, Paul Wenninger’s Uncanny Valley unravels its story of wartime trauma through the camaraderie of two lone soldiers fighting their way out of the trenches of World War I. Employing the aesthetic mechanics found in stop-motion animation, Wenninger’s real-life protagonists move as marionettes in a theatre of war that flashes at every interval with the fear and danger. Impelled by survival instincts and a balletic camerawork that transverses time and space in awe-inspiring long-takes, the two soldiers emerge out of the ruins of war, shell-shocked and spiritually defeated. Atmospheric and compelling, Uncanny Valley offers a potent statement on the inevitable abstraction of history, erasing individual experience in favour of posterity’s superficial representation. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF)

A choreography-film charged with political significance, THAT HAS BEEN BOTHERING ME THE WHOLE TIME brings up issues of freedom and prohibition in the life of Muslim women. Here the burka represents a form of self-expression. The viewer is kept at a distance through disparate shots of a moving body, while very intense rustling and breathing places him right in the middle of the scene. Since this could never actually be possible in public, the short’s statement can only be done by showing that the film itself is an illusion. The final behind-the-scenes shot shows that everything was just a performance, hijacking cinema through cinema. (Bianca Bănică, BIEFF)

Winner of Best Short Film at Venice, the latest film from master of (post)modernist experimental cinema Peter Tscherkassky, COMING ATTRACTIONS is an homage to silent film’s cinema of attractions. His celluloid manipulation of fragments from advertising footage references sequences from silent films by adhering to their respective cinematic language. A pas-de-deux of form and rhythm, Coming Attractions brings the past to the present by offering a lesson in the history of cinema that is as much food for thought as it delights the senses. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF).

Set in the near-future of a dystopian metropolis, ESIOD 2015 is a lyrical envisioning of an impending financial singularity, where a centralized commodification has monetized everything, from urban spaces, social structures to ultimately, our collective memory. Greeted by the quiet sterility of modern architecture and disembodied voices, the film’s protagonist enters the city’s downtown sprawl with wide-eyed wonder. Passing through this socially-hostile urban babylon and its ghettoizing checkpoints, she reaches her destination: the banking headquarters of society’s stored data, finances and memories. Inside, as the institution’s virtual manager guides her access to the account, body turns performative and shared memory and history dissolve in virtual pointilism. Beneath her expressive emotions lies a deeper secret, hidden away from the singularity’s algorithms - an intended subversion meant to bring about the revolution from within. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2017)

Metaphorically turning their backs on stereotypes of form and narrative and focusing their attention - and camera - on the ‘gloomier’ side of California, Gerhard Treml and Leo Calice distance themselves from more prudent ways of approaching this American territory in cinema. The three stories feature characters who have moved to the desert to escape the anxieties inflicted by an increasingly disturbing society. The schizophrenic shaman of native Indian background, the mother worried sick about the danger of her daughter's falling victim to pedophiles, and the woman who runs a wormfarm and claims to lead a self-sufficient life, are depicted in minimalist scenes shot in disconcerting static bird’s eye view while their stories are spoken in voice-overs of tranquil tone but troubling content. The authors have chosen a most improbable angle for the shooting and telling of profound human stories with a unique blend of intimacy and distance. (Ioana Florescu, BIEFF 2017)

Isolating himself from the outside world and real human contact, the urban man reinvents his identity in the virtual realm, in the deliciously cheeky METUBE, by Daniel Moshel, a tribute to the countless performers seeking self-expression through the rhizomes of YouTube. Famous opera tenor August Schram plays the balding, meek protagonist whose self-recorded performance of Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen is interrupted by his doting mother. From there, the one-man show unleashes a flurry of genre-and-gender benders, reflecting the Internet’s kaleidoscopic personalities, as well as celebrating our aspiring, inner diva. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF)

DIARY OF SOMEONE WAITING shows the usual non-heroic life of young soldiers guarding the border, preparing for a war that is not coming, waiting to catch immigrants that never appear, bouncing around in the snow like twelve-year boys at camp. With absurd beckettian humor, any sense of authority disappears as the soldiers film one-another. The movie is a generic description of what life itself becomes at one point: a long wait for something to happen. With a keen eye sketching sharp observations, the film explores the soldiers’ true selves, in time of peace, when they have to make up their own minds on who and how to be. (Bianca Bănică, BIEFF)

Corpulent sex slaves, tuba-playing Nazi obsessives, reborn doll fantasists — just a regular stroll through the neighbourhood, then, for patented guru of the grotesque Ulrich Seidl, who makes an intriguing return to documentary filmmaking with IN THE BASEMENT. Grabby and grubby in equal measure, this meticulously composed trawl through the contents of several middle-class Austrians’ cellars (a space, according to Seidl, that his countrymen traditionally give over to their most personal hobbies) yields more than a few startling discoveries. (Guy Lodge, Variety)

Underlying In the Basement is the notion that every man and woman on the street could, in secret, be a bigot or a great opera singer. That In the Basement considers a range of possibilities on this spectrum of hidden identities is what makes its exploration of the darkest corners of the human psyche equal to, if not superior, to Seidl's most recent narrative features. (Tomas Hachard, Slant Magazine)

The basement in Austria is a place of free time and the private sphere. Many Austrians spend more time in the basement of their home than in their living room, which often is only for show. In the basement they actually indulge their needs, their hobbies, passions and obsessions. But in our unconscious, the basement is also a place of darkness, a place of fear, a place of human abysses. The film is about people and basements and what people do in their basements in their free time. The film is about obsessions. The film is about brass-band music and opera arias, about expensive furniture and cheap male jokes, about sexuality and shooting, fitness and fascism, whips and dolls. After his ambitious PARADISE Trilogy, Ulrich Seidl returns to the documentary form with In the Basement. A film essay that is both funny and sad, it uses the director’s characteristic film tableaux to delve into the underground of the Austrian soul.