sixpackfilm

A young woman move towards a house that holds a potentially dangerous spirit that has been tormenting her. The woman tries to fight against the film itself as it starts to cause the world to collapse.

Bergmanesque ghosts appear at the bedside of Edward Weki, a 75-year-old Sudanese man suffering from the final stage of Parkinson’s: Alma, the nurse of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, and a female version of Death from his The Seventh Seal help the old man recover lost memories of his life on the island of Farö.

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

A few hours in the life of empress Sisi; a summer night at Gödöllö. A game with operetta and melodrama; a grotesque with much colour, music, dancing, and bloodshed.

The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off — sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer-director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear — born Anthony Robertson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater — after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s.

The first of Peter Tscherkassky's Cinemascope trilogy of short films is a fragmented glimpse of images pulsating with chaotic rhythm as they fight white margins for room in his palette. Mirrored frames being split by white margin and trying to reassemble again like the poles of a magnet, a train approaching station and colliding with itself in white-hot blistering chaos.

Anton and Franz live together since the beginnings of 20th century. They talk about their difficulties of being vampires, since their first bite in 1938. Their inconsistent arguments recall those of normal human beings. And history repeat itself. As if that were not enough, they also doesn`t really like each other much.

Composed of 28 static-camera scenes from everyday (occupied)-Tibetan life, each picture (without narration) a "narrative" lasting several minutes, these 28 views explore the contradictions between the traditional way of life and modernism's obvious invasion of Tibet.

Elena Wolff submerges into the turbulent world of the young, up-and-coming art scene of Linz. In a series of episodes, Asche tells of three couples and an outsider, of alpha males and muses, of loneliness, and the urge for self-realization. In doing so, this pop satire of the art world exercises a high-volume criticism of both patriarchy and the cultural scene—including unexpected vendettas and bizarre encounters.

Broadcast on the Austrian Television (ORF) in June 1972, TV & VT-Works comprises a series of ‘tele-actions’ in which a cigar-smoking newsreader is periodically interrupted by public interventions raising the question “Is this Art?”. Disrupting the smooth flow of information and thus the illusion of comprehending the world from one’s living room, these actions interrogate TV temporality to examine the mechanisms of production and spectatorship. A work of culture jamming avant la lettre.

Experimental filmmaker Selma Doborac presents a radical and uncompromising essay on the impossibility of depicting the atrocities of war through insightful subtitles and meditative footage of abandoned structures that belong to the present as well as to the past.

In the darkroom, 50 unexposed film strips were laid across a surface, upon which a frame of "La sortie des ouvrier de l'usine Lumière" was projected. The stringing together of the individual developed sections make up the new film, which reads the original frame like a page from a musical score: within the strips from top to bottom and sequentially from left to right.

Shifting between a suburban hostelry, domestic harmony and the idyllic setting of the Prater funfair, Johannes Holzhausen's documentation is a respectful and sympathetic observation of the long-term relationship between two people leading an unspectacular existence on the edge of society. A retrospective view of an unhappy life from the perspective of happier times.

Somalia. A policewoman sits in her parked car. After a while, she gets out, puts on her service cap, and enters the prison. There, decisive hours have dawned for young Farah. Organizational machinery starts up around him. Farah is examined by a doctor, instructed by the bailiff, and looked after by an imam. Farah is waiting for his parents to visit. “How are you?” is the question everyone asks him that day. Each time, “Good” is his concise answer. Only when the policewoman takes Farah out of town the next morning does the unspeakable become a painful reality.

A man rescues a boy and later tries to get him off his back but to little avail, so they end up drifting around a subterranean world, populated by grotesque masked figures. A hundred years after Chaplin filmed his first feature film, The Kid, Norbert Pfaffenbichler offers an experimental punk-style interpretation, which the filmmaker himself has defined as a dystopian slapstick film.

Inside a museum, nowadays. A diorama represents two young soldiers in the trenches. All of a sudden, we are thrown into the diorama: the immobile soldiers come to life, there is terror on their faces – the camera dances around them – explosions, chaos, fog: everything flies about in the air. With every gunshot, they shudder and curl up

In Nauruan, Anubumin means »night«—and darkness is what the fourth joint film by Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler begins with. The small and inconspicuous island of Nauru with close to 10,000 inhabitants lies in the Pacific at a great distance to the mainland. But Nauru is a tragic place steeped in history that has been overwritten by numerous narratives. The film addresses these different narratives, starting with the early exploitation of the island and its calcite and phosphate deposits by the colonial powers in the 19th century. After the golden 1970s, when the »Birdshit island« was flush with money, the phosphate was completely mined and the island state soon became insolvent. Since then, Nauru has turned into a gloomy place: 80% of the area is uninhabitable; the attempt to tap new sources of income led to the wide-scale practice of money laundering.

Every encounter with an image, every interaction searches for its own form. She is the other gaze is a collaboration with five female visual artists of an older generation who have been part of the Viennese art scene since the 1970s and engaged in the women's movement. In dialogue with the filmmaker Renate Bertlmann, Linda Christanell, Lore Heuermann, Karin Mack and Margot Pilz share their early works and artistic practices. They remember how their self-determination evolved between artistic ambitions, economic constraints, adaptation and resistance to the prevailing patriarchal social structures. In their role as feminist pioneers, the protagonists are a great influence on the contemporary art scene and the self-understanding of younger artists today. With their voices and narratives, they become collaborators passing on feminist thinking and artistic experiences.

Russian-born director Aleksey Lapin travels back to his relatives’ home village near the Ukrainian border, where he himself used to spend every summer. The film crew introduce themselves at a specially organized musical event, claiming that they have come to cast a historical film that is to be set in the village. What follows is a charming, semi-fictional documentary by and with the village community.

Dropping Furniture shows the destruction of a living space. The film is conceived as a symbolic image for the loss of an existence.