AUSTRIAN FILMS OF THE 1990s
At the beginning of the 1990s, much seems possible. The Cold War is over, borders to the East are opening, and Europe is growing closer together. Mobility, consumerism, and new technologies shape everyday life, while familiar social certainties are slowly losing their significance. Austria is undergoing profound change – politically, culturally, and socially.
Austrian cinema also responds sensitively to these changes. It places at its centre figures who move between origins and the future, the provinces and the metropolis, different languages, cultures, and ways of life, as their sense of direction begins to falter. Traditional images of Austria give way to narratives of in-between spaces and peripheral zones: railway stations, shopping centres, and nightclubs become settings for a society that is reorganising itself and shaped by previously unfamiliar influences from other cultures. While the country opens up to the outside, debates about identity and belonging intensify within.
At the same time, a new generation of filmmakers enters the scene, whose work is less interested in grand national narratives than in the everyday lives of their characters, urban spaces, and influences from popular culture, and in which documentary immediacy meets stylised visual worlds. Between euphoria and uncertainty, the five selected works in this programme by Filmarchiv Austria can also be situated. They invite us to (re)discover the 1990s as a lived experience that continues to resonate into the present.
The film series will continue at Metro Kinokulturhaus following the Viennale.
A program by Filmarchiv Austria.
