Viennale - Vienna International Film Festival

The Festival

The Viennale is Austria’s most important international film event, as well as one of the oldest and best-known festivals in the German-speaking world. Every October, the Viennale takes place in beautiful cinemas in Vienna’s historic center, providing the festival with an international orientation and a distinctive urban flair. A high percentage of the more than 96,000 visitors to the festival from Austria and abroad is made up of a decidedly young audience.

In its main program, the Viennale shows a carefully picked selection of new films from all over the globe as well as from Austria, some of them international premieres. The choice of about 300 films offers a cross-section of bold film-making which stands apart from the aesthetics of mainstream conventionality and is politically relevant. Aside from its focus on the newest feature films of every genre and structural form imaginable, the festival gives particular attention to documentary films, international short films, as well as experimental works and crossover films.

The Viennale receives regular international acclaim for the large-scale retrospective on relevant aspects of film history it organises every year in collaboration with the Austrian Filmmuseum, its numerous special programs, as well as for its tributes and homages dedicated to important person alities and institutions in film-making. The conclusion of the festival sees the awarding of the FIPRESCI Prize of the International Film Critics’ Association and the Vienna Film Prize of the City of Vienna.

Gala screenings, special events and parties are as much part of the festival as interviews, audience discussions and opportunities to meet the many international guests of the festival. In recent years, the Viennale has established a secure place for itself on the international festival scene: It has become a festival which offers a program of high quality in a relaxed urban atmosphere in autumn, when Vienna is at its most attractive. It presents an exciting array of newest trends contrasted with historical reference points. It is a festival of information, surprises, discoveries and above all, of films.

A short History of the Viennale from 1960 to the Present

It was a “leaden time”: on one of the geopolitical borders of the Cold War, a superficially denazified Austria was attempting to reinvent itself as a cultural superpower, an “intellectual continent” in the words of the historian Friedrich Heer. The so-called “long 1950s” continued far into the next decade and were dominated by the cultural and educational policies of the first post-war education minister, Felix Hurdes of the conservative Austrian People’s Party. The policies reflected right-wing Catholic “culturalism” and were almost seamlessly connected to the period before the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. In the official state cultural doctrine of the post-war era it was especially important that the foremost institutions, the Burgtheater and the State Opera, be actively involved in the creation of sense and meaning, and a certain wallowing in Habsburg mythology was also a fitting accompaniment to a cultural understanding that sought refuge from the immediate past in sublime timelessness.

Cinema, on the other hand, was considered an inferior artistic phenomenon, a leisure activity for the lower classes and a reflection of the typically American culture of chewing-gum that a middle-class elite preferred not to find sticking to the soles of their shoes. Domestic Austrian film production consisted mostly of theatrical comedies, rural farces, tourism films, Vienna musical comedies and the revue films of producer Franz Antel, and they stretched in a never-ending line towards the horizon. Hardly anything was done, however, to promote the production of art films, apart from the isolated initiatives of the French or Soviet occupiers, the series of proletarian films, the religious film weeks and, finally, the “good-film campaign” Aktion der gute Film, which the Ministry of Education launched in 1956 after the occupiers had gone home. Film ratings were believed to be a superweapon for separating the wheat from the chaff and raising the deplorable level of mainstream taste.

Austrian film journalists at the time believed that cinematic culture had reached a historical low ebb, and they sought ways and means to reverse the flow. A group formed around the journalist Sigmund Kennedy, who was to become the Viennale’s first director.