The 57th Viennale closed with the gala screening of the film MARTIN EDEN in the presence of director Pietro Marcello. With one day less than last year, the festival posted yet another great success, with the attendance figure of 92,100 (2018: 93,200).

“It was a fantastic edition, with exceptional resonance from our audience and the international guests,” said Viennale directorEva Sangiorgi, happily. “I have the feeling that the Viennale is a family that constantly grows.”

One of the first highlights of this years’ festival, the second under the artistic directorship of Eva Sangiorgi, was the brilliant opening gala in the Gartenbaukino, with the impressive speeches by Chancellor Brigitte Bierlein, Vienna Executive City Coun-cillor for Cultural Affairs and Science Veronica Kaup-Hasler, and Eva Sangiorgi in the presence of the actress Adèle Haenel, andwith an emotional moment of remembrance for the late Viennale president Eric Pleskow.

The festival program of the past 14 days evoked extremely positive reactions from the local audience as well as from international guests. One highlight among many was the CINEMA LIVE evening in the Austrian Film Museum, with a double projection and the live scoring of films by Silvia das Fadas. The artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler also presented a program especiallycreated for Vienna, with new films, and live music at the Viennale Headquarters. The premiere of Sabine Derflinger’s DIE DOHNAL, the film about the legendary Austrian feminist politician and minister for women during the 1970s and the 1990s, developed into a particularly thrilling evening.

A great success emerged from the Monograph on Angela Schanelec. The filmmaker, who has won prizes at the Berlinale, person-ally presented her films and would have been pleased with the enormous, ever growing reception over the course of the festival. Cecilia Mangini, an icon of Italian cinema, delighted the audience with her films but especially also with her unbridled energy and strong political stance.

From the festival’s perspective, especially pleasing was the fact that many visitors also made their way to the demanding talksand discussions in the Viennale Zentrale – as was the case with the talks featuring Angela Schanelec, the discussion about threat-ening conflicts and imminent wars, as well as a round table discussion on the topic of film critiquing.

The Retrospective O Partigiano! Pan-European Partisan Film, organized in conjunction with the Film Museum, garnered a great deal of attention – also international – with attendance figures reaching around 4,300, projected over the entire length of the program.

Lucrecia Martel: AI

In his autobiography, the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden warns that “the greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition”. Lucrecia Martel mimics a typical automated process of pattern recognition in her trailer for the Viennale – but renders it strange, surreal and disquieting. What central piece of “found footage” does she hurl against this machine? It is the famous “Psychiatric Interview” with an anonymous “Patient no. 18” filmed at UCLA in 1961, today viewed by 85 million people on YouTube. A young man (whose subsequent fate remains a secret) speaks deliberately and thoughtfully about his desire to “play the piano for people”; he is duly classified as a case of “negativism in a catatonic schizophrenic”. Martel combines the man and his interviewer, loops eye movement and blurs mouth movement; she introduces flashes of other, associative images and underscores everything with an ever-changing collage of musical selections that sits on the edge of our aural comprehension. The will of AI to control, sort, and label everyone in the world is countered by a sublime act of audiovisual subversion. (Adrian Martin)

AI
Lucrecia Martel, Argentinien/A, 2019, 2 min, eOF

Sound: Tritón Sonido (Manuel de Andrés, Guido Berenblum, Gerardo Kalmar)
Postproduction: Sebastián Toro
VFX: Julian Stirparo
Production:  Rei Cine (Benjamin Domenech)
World Sales: sixpackfilm
World Rights: Viennale

Concept & realisation: Rainer Dempf
© Viennale

This year, the Viennale welcomed a total of 180 directors and actors, who came to Vienna to personally present their films at the festival.

International media representatives who covered the Viennale 2018 included journalists from der Tagesspiegel, Der Spiegel, die TAZ, Libération, France24 TV, Expresso (P), NRC Handelsblad (NL), BBC World, La diaria (E), Brecha (E), Oslobodjenje sowie Fach und Branchenmedien wie Cahiers du cinéma (F), Sight & Sound (GB), Film Comment (USA), Cinemascope (KAN), Filmmaker Magazine (USA), Trafic (F), Cineuropa, mubi.com (USA), Blickpunkt:Film (D), kinozeit.de (D), artechock.de (D), critic.de (D), epd Film (D), Cargo (D), Freitag (D), Positif (F), Ekran (SLO), Cinephilia (GR), otroscines.com (ARG), La vida útil (ARG), Canal Once (MEX), Cinética (BRA), Scena9 (RO), colta.ru (RUS), Senses of cinema (AUS), De filmkrant (NL).

Furthermore, we welcomed representatives of the Berlinale and the film festivals in Locarno, Rotterdam, Marseille, Lissabon, Leipzig, München, Karlovy Vary, Montevideo, Dresden, Warschau, Jeonju City among many others.

A total of about 650 media and industry representatives were accredited at the Viennale 2019.

We’re looking forward to seeing you again at the 2020 festival.

VIENNA FILM PRIZE
Jury: Alexander Charim, Herwig Kempinger, Helga Rössler

The Vienna Film Prize, donated by the City of Vienna and awarded at the Viennale, goes to a current Austrian feature film that has been screened during the past year. The prize consists of a sum of money, donated by the city’s cultural department, monetary support from the Hotel The Harmonie Vienna and generous material assets, sponsored by BLAUTÖNE and viennaFX. There are two awards: one for the best Austrian film and the Special Jury Prize. Owing to the generosity and commitment of all involved, the Vienna Film Prize continues to represent encouragement and recognition of the work of Austrian filmmakers.

Best Austrian Film

Excerpt from the jury’s decision:
SPACE DOGS by Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter tells the story of Laika, the first dog in space, of her brutal upbringing and her lonely death in the service of Soviet propaganda. And it searches for Laika’s spirit in today’s Moscow, following some street dogs as they move through the city.  In order to do so, the film is shot from a dog’s eye view, looking through their eyes at the strange world of humans, of whom we mostly only see legs. So it’s not about a human world with dogs, but about a dog world in which, by chance, there are also people. We see these dogs angry and tired, lonely and playful, proud and vicious, tender and hungry. We see how the animals are used and abused by humans and nevertheless remain themselves, even if this is sometimes not nice to look at.

The viewer gets very close to these dogs, due to the panting, dancing and agility conveyed by Yunus Roy Imer’s  great camerawork. Before seeing this film, we didn’t know that we actually wanted to get so close to Moscow’s street dogs. This film is full of experiences we haven’t had before, and full of images we’ve never seen. It is brutal, strange, poetic, startling and surprising. It isn’t a documentary, although it’s about reality; it isn’t a feature film, although we can see inside the dogs’ souls. This film has invented its own form. A jury colleague said: “After this film, you need a schnapps.” What better compliment can there be?

Special Jury Prize

Excerpt from the jury’s decision:
SLOW DOWN. MEN AT WORK.
An African parallel economy in Styria, from which interested Hungarians and locals also profit. The Hungarian car-dealer couple envies Cliff, the Nigerian mechanic, who will soon send his car parts to Africa to sell them there: “In December in Africa – just sun? No jacket? That’s good!”A calm, poetic and touching film that raises more questions than it answers; a film that doesn’t know beforehand what it will find.

VIENNALE STANDARD READERS’ JURY PRIZE
Jury: Maximilian Gurschler, Astrid Kaltenegger, Barbara Macek, Agnes Peterseil, Philip Stöger       

The Standard Readers’ Jury Prize goes to a film that does not yet have an Austrian distributor and is especially recommended for screening in Austrian cinemas. Should the award-winning film find a distributor, Der Standard supports its film run with free advertising space in its newspaper.

The STANDARD READERS’ JURY PRIZE goes to:

Excerpt from the jury’s decision:
Emotionally moving and using powerful colors, director Kantemir Balagov tells the story of two young women who return from World War II and take care of the war-wounded in a military hospital in Leningrad. He repeatedly breaks with expectations and relentlessly contrasts moments of serenity with the bitter seriousness of life in a military hospital.
The film adopts a radically subjective and, above all, female perspective to show the destructive consequences of war, and the irreparable emotional damage, but also the power that arises from rebelling against past horrors that extend all the way into the present.

FIPRESCI PRIZE (PRIZE OF THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF FILM CRITICS)
Jury: Žiga Brdnik (Casopis Večer, Film magazine Ekran, Dialogi), Magdalena Miedl (Salzburger Nachrichten, ORF.at), Alejandra Trelles (La Diaria, Brecha)

The FIPRESCI PRIZE is awarded to the first or second film of a young director.

The FIPRESCI Prize goes to:

Excerpt from the jury’s decision:

The FIPRESCI award goes to a film that sublimely talks about personal and everyday history. Through a love story between the East and the West, the mature and the maturing, it skillfully – and as close to life as it gets – intertwines different times: the past, the present and the future. It does so through two powerful and opposing metaphors of human prowess and natural beauty, a tunnel and a giraffe. The prize goes to the film GIRAFFE by Anne Sofie Hartmann.

ERSTE BANK’S ExtraVALUE FILM AWARD
Jury: Silvia Bohrn, Boris Manner, Jed Rapfogel

Erste Bank’s ExtraVALUE Film Award was awarded for the nineth time at the Viennale 2019. An independent jury selected an award winner from films by Austrian directors shown at the festival. The prize includes a two-month residency in New York and a presentation of the winner’s work in that city. Erste Bank’s ExtraVALUE Film Award is realized in collaboration with the Viennale, the Deutsches Haus at NYU and Anthology Film Archives. This year’s ExtraVALUE Film Award goes ex aequo to:

Excerpt from the jury’s decision:
Erste Bank’s ExtraVALUE Film Award 2019 goes to Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter for SPACE DOGS:
A truly original hybrid that combines not only documentary and fictional elements but even different modes of non-fiction, SPACE DOGS is predicated on the story of Laika, the Moscow street dog who was the first resident of planet Earth to travel into space. By means of an invented fairy tale by which Laika’s ghost haunts the planet to this day, it is at once a meditation on the historical role of dogs and monkeys in early space exploration (via extraordinary archival footage) and a contemporary study of the stray dogs of Moscow, as they roam the streets by day and night. By shooting from a vantage close to the ground, the filmmakers adopt the perspective of the dogs both philosophically and literally. The result is a kind of city symphony in which the city is made strange as refracted through the eyes of its non-human inhabitants. A profound and rigorously unsentimental film about animals that encompasses both cinema verité and science-fiction fabulism, SPACE DOGS is by extension about those residents of a city who are overlooked, undervalued, and exploited.

Erste Bank’s ExtraVALUE Film Award 2019 goes to Friedl vom Gröller for L’AVENIR? DE F.V.G.?
One of the most recent short films by the dizzyingly prolific Friedl vom Gröller, L’AVENIR? DE F.V.G.? is a work whose brevity and playfulness belie its astonishing inventiveness, evocativeness, and formal expansiveness. It is a portrait of two individuals – a deaf woman and her elderly Senegalese friend – as well as of two forms of non-spoken language that are both radically different from each other and (presumably) incomprehensible to most audiences: sign language and fortune telling with cowrie shells. The spectacle of unfamiliar forms of signification, and the mystery of the fortune teller’s magic, stand in inspired contrast to the everyday normality of the setting: a public laundromat. Through the structure and expressive power of the film itself, the women’s respective languages take on a cinematic meaning that renders them comprehensible even to the sign-language or fortune-telling illiterate.

A selection of the best photos of the Viennale 2019:

Many visitors of the Viennale 2019 made their way to the demanding talks and discussions in the Viennale Zentrale in the Kunsthalle Wien in the Museumsquartier – as was the case with the talk featuring Bertrand Bonello, the discussion about threat-ening conflicts and imminent wars, as well as a round table discussion on the topic of film critiquing.

The dancing visitors of the Viennale Zentrale were excited about the various DJ performances: Montoya, Oberst & Buchner, Andaka, Kompleks, Scientist, Kristian Davidek, DJ Moe, Vatileaks, Forever Traxx, Monsterheart DJ-Set, Hausgemacht-Kollektiv, DJ Hertzbube, J´aime Julien, Belly Dance Service, Alaska Al, DJ Nomad, Misonica, Therese Terror, Gassen aus Zucker und Journey to Tarab. Also the various live acts like the Peruvian electro-cumbia duo DENGUE DENGUE DENGUE or the electrifying performance of LULU SCHMIDT were well received. Furthermore, there was a large influx of visitors, especially during the conversation with the film maker Angela Schanelec.

The programme was rounded off by the Viennale Afterparties at the Viennale Zentrale - including the farewell concert of Johann Sebastian Bass with illustrious special guests.