In My Notes on Mars, Lili Horvát doesn’t want to provide definitive answers at all costs. On the contrary, the viewers have the precious opportunity to draw their own conclusions whilst being mesmerised by images of great visual and communicative power. Opening film of the Giornate degli Autori section at the 2026 Venice Film Festival.
Rubikon is not a film that relies entirely on special effects or particular action scenes. What Leni Lauritsch has made is actually a successful and often adrenaline-fuelled Kammerspiel in which also important moral questions are raised. How are we responsible for the health of our planet? How important is it to think about safeguarding the common good? And, above all, what will happen to our children?
In its complex simplicity, MappaMundi successfully depicts the history not only of our planet, but also of mankind, even hypothesising a (not) too distant, but practically inevitable future. Can there ever really be a definitive end, however? Bady Minck does not want to formulate any precise theory on the matter.
Make/Real is one of the many possible forms of cinema that could not exist without film history. A hymn to the seventh art, but also to modernity and to all that the near future could offer us.
If The Trouble with Being Born – directed by Sandra Wollner – on the one hand, reveals a good knowledge of film medium, on the other hand, it ends up being an essentially inconclusive film, which does not always make the most of its potential.
Little Joe, the sixth feature film by director Jessica Hausner, already in competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2019 (where the protagonist Emily Beecham won the Best Actress Award), is a deliberately ambiguous work, which does not aim to give precise answers to the questions raised and which makes this ambiguity its greatest strength. At the Viennale 2019.
Climate change has, for several years now, become a rather topical issue. And what does cinema, for its part, do? Great witness of our times, the seventh art has also often had its say on the subject. One example is the feature film The Station – made by Marvin Kren in 2013 – a reinterpretation/tribute to John Carpenter’s famous The Thing (1982). An operation, this one, however, very risky.
It is not surprising that a feature film like 1. April 2000 (a fine fantapolitical satire directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner) was made precisely in 1952, seven years after the end of the world war and only three years before the Austrian State Treaty by which, among other things, the nation’s neutrality was officially proclaimed.