Both Berlinale documentary entries made in Austria – NOTES FROM THE UNDERWORLD by Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel and RUNNING ON EMPTY by Lisa Weber – are among the 21 documentaries selected across all sections for the prestigious Berlinale distinction. The two Austrian PANORAMA contributions will be vying for the € 40,000 prize money along with new works from Rithy Panh or Jia Zhang-Ke.

A beautiful house. Countryside all around. A father lives alone here with his 10-year-old daughter. That's what it looks like at first sight. The girl, who swims, speaks and laughs, is an android machine programmed to keep alive the presence of a girl who was lost – while also satisfying the desires of its owner and relieving his loneliness. At some point she vanishes but continues to function in her own way. Sandra Wollner’s THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN does not move along narrative lines but penetrates uncomfortable mental spaces, raising difficult questions in the zones of encounter between artificial intelligence and human perception.

If Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel don't travel for their film project, they plunge beneath the surface of their city. A fascination with the underlying melancholic aspects of Vienna songs leads them to one of its most outstanding interpreters. Kurt Girk’s intriguing account of his life is interwoven in NOTES FROM THE UNDERWORLD with the city's gangster milieu of the late 1960s in the shape of its legendary protagonist Alois Schmutzer; the two men are bound by a lifelong friendship as well as a serious, harrowing travesty of justice.

Claudia was just 11 when the interest of filmmaker Lisa Weber was drawn to this cool teenager. She became pregnant at 14, and when she was 18 the young mother wanted to join the Austrian Army. This was also the moment when Lisa Weber began to follow her around with a camera. What started out as the story of a modern, everyday heroine developed into a long-term study of day-by-day stagnation. In RUNNING ON EMPTY Lisa Weber has ventured into a narrative nadir and captured with unfailing patience the petering out of existential driving force.

«(…) a film that weaves together vérité footage with voiceover philosophizing from Sauper himself and clips from an assortment of archive footage. In another filmmaker's hands, this might have become a message-heavy morass, but Sauper and his co-editor, veteran Yves Deschamps work the material with a remarkable fluidity and gracefulness that's consistently engaging and surprising», wrote Leslie Felperin on EPICENTRO, Hubert Sauper’s tender portrait of Cuba and winner of the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Prize.

 

Best Director Award to Johanna Moder’s ONCE WERE REBELS, Audience Award to Arash T. Riahi’s WHERE NO ONE KNOWS US and Best Short Film to DAS BESTE ORCHESTER DER WELT by Henning Backhaus.  The Saarbrücken juries have pointed out three productions from Austria and Maresi Riegner as Best Young Actress Award.

Encounters is a newly created competitive Berlinale section devoted to innovative cinematic visions. THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN by young director Sandra Wollner – the story of a machine and the ghosts we all carry within us – is part of the very first selection presented at this year's 70^th Berlinale (February 20 to March 1).

«…only an idealist treats his audience with as much respect as he does here. And only an idealist invites his audience to look at the world as closely and deeply as he does as he reminds us that it is only by seeing — really seeing — the world as it exists, that we stand any chance at all of saving it», wrote Manohla Dargis in her NYT review of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s striking essay EARTH. Read more