300 years of a remarkable musical instrument. Crafted by the Italian master Bussotti (Cecchi) in 1681, the red violin has traveled through Austria, England, China, and Canada, leaving both beauty and tragedy in its wake. In Montreal, Samuel L Jackson plays an appraiser going over its complex...
A portrait of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt whose lavish, sexual paintings came to symbolize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century.
A series of snapshots from the life of a fictional actress named Shirley serves to weave together thirteen paintings by Edward Hopper (e.g. "Office at Night", "Western Motel", "Usherette", "A Woman in the Sun") into a fascinating synthesis of painting and film, personal and political history. Each...
Ema & Death’s-Head deals with the precarious border between humanism and the protection of one’s own life in situations when one excludes the other. Marika Sándorfi is hiding a Jewish boy during the dramatic era of the First Slovak State on the Slovak-Hungarian border. Šimon Holan, the boy in...
A young composer moves from Berlin to the island of Ibiza and begins a friendship with an elderly woman whose painful past has caused her to reject everything to do with Germany, including her native language.
Through previously undiscovered private letters, photos and diaries that were found in the Himmler family house in 1945, the "The Decent One" exposes a unique and at times uncomfortable access to the life and mind of the merciless "Architect of the Final Solution" Heinrich Himmler.
When Hans Hass seeks a secretary for his Viennese office in the summer of 1947, Lotte Baierl applies for the job. She has just graduated from high school and is a big fan of Hass. Lotte is learning how to handle diving equipment and underwater cameras, as she wants to participate in the next...
Herbert lives a rather simple life, left to his own devices. He works as a projectionist in a shabby Viennese movie theater and lives alone with his red nameless cat in the free caretaker's apartment of a somewhat run-down apartment building. Now and then he visits his mother in a nursing home,...
September 11, 1898: The imperial family’s personal physician, Dr. Herman Widerhofer, is deeply shocked by the news that an anarchist has assassinated Empress Elisabeth in Geneva. He then shuts himself up in his private rooms and recalls the empress’ fateful life. We learn the truth about...
Five university students are required to write a paper on a Kafka short story. In a smoke cloud of inspiration, they take a road trip to film it instead.
Vienna in the eighties. An accidental meeting in a restaurant. She, Hannah, is Jewish and has a live-in lover, a young and successful architect. He, Friedrich, is a German and lives permanently in Vienna. Two worlds collide with another, begin to become entangled in each other. Friedrich too, has...
Stillness, observing and the absurd are the secrets behind Ilse Aichinger’s poetry, as brought to life in the film WHERE I LIVE. Figures from stories come to life in a house, whose stories sink in upon themselves. Also, never before shown Super-8 footage shot by Aichinger, inspires awe at our...
Judit is up to her neck in art studies and the elitist art community but chucks it all to pursue a successful career as a billiard professional -- not exactly a likely alternative in real life, but certainly more lucrative. Just as she is finally at the apex of her chosen second field, Judit...
The story of an old married couple. As she dies his imagination calls her back to life and they have a wonderful time together like they didn’t have for many years....
Jan, a freelance journalist, and Sabine, the mother of his two children and a textile designer, have no money. Sabine is abandoned by her husband and then gets caught up in the bureaucracy. A sober psychogram of a woman who is fighting and hoping for her life and everyday life.
