For a book project, photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders took photographs of 30 stars of adult movies, each pair of photographs in the same pose, clothed and nude. This film records the photo shoots and includes interviews with the performers and commentary from eight writers (and John Waters). The actors and writers discuss economics, nudity and exhibitionism, careers, and private lives.
A Kellergasse – the cellar lane – is one of the distinguishing cultural and physical features of the winegrowing region Niederösterreich – Lower Austria. There are more than a thousand of them. Until recently, wine was not only stored in the Kellergasse, but pressed and fermented there as well. Today, the Kellergassen have less to do with occupation and more with recreation. A documentary by Georg Riha follows a year in the life of this valuable cultural legacy.
In the sixties, Peter Handke was one of the first to show how the business works: the writer as angry young man and pop star of the literary scene. As soon as he was on the bestseller lists, he turned his back on the hype. For many years, he has lived and worked in his house in a Parisian suburb, more quietly and more hospitably. Peter Handke's precise, free gaze becomes perceptible in his texts, his conversations, the cosmos of his notebooks.
A Zen priest in San Francisco and cookbook author use Zen Buddhism and cooking to relate to everyday life.
"Austria - First Victim of National Socialism" - this is the core theme of the self-image of the country that first welcomed Hitler with waving flags and arms stretched to the sky: Nation, People and Race - Sieg Heil! Monuments, commemorative events and in between the helplessness of dull remembrance. What to do with the lie, where to put the pain, and why again? The war of narratives begins with the liberation of the concentration camps, with the piles of corpses - and it continues to this day. A final journey with those who were there. Which story do we tell ourselves, and which do we want to hear?
IRVING PARK is the story of four gay men in their 60s who live together in Chicago, exploring an unconventional lifestyle of master/slave relationships. A family based on free choice and the consent to lose one’s personal freedom in favor of the desire of the Other.
Presenter Holly Hamilton tells the feelgood story of the Glentoran team who left Belfast on a European football adventure just before the First World War to win the Vienna Cup, the first ever European Cup.
The naked floodgates burst open in the Saucy 70s and the 80s continued the trend. Welcome to the 80s, Jerry Falwell, Reagan conservatism, VCRs, pay tv, big hair and AIDS. Drive-ins and grindhouses were replaced by multiplex theaters, but the VCR and Pay TV came to the rescue with a flood of direct to video sexy features. Remember trying to watch scrambled Pay TV looking for some skin?
The Naked Camera
A collection of nude and/or topless scenes from various films featuring actresses who were either famous at the time or who became famous later on.
With a history of intrigue, romance, opera, festivals, old world grandeur, Austrians blend tradition and culture to live life at its best. What other countries say with words, Austrians say with the music of Mozart, Strauss and Schubert. This video tours a land of spectacular beauty, sounds of music, tastes of strudel and Sachertorte, touches of history and the pleasant smell of a winter's fire after a day in the Alps.
This short film profiles the benevolent Mike Sullivan, who has been in the process of shooting a stop-motion robot sex film in his New York City apartment for the last ten years. Obsessed with the meticulous construction of the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands, leaving him only tiny paths to navigate and no place to film his epic.
Endphase tells the story of one the last WWII massacres which was not spoken about for 75 years. In the night of 2 May 1945, 228 Jewish women, children and old men were murdered in Hofamt Priel, a small village in Austria. The perpetrators were never found. The film is a journey into the past of the neighbouring communities Persenbeug and Hofamt Priel, where the brothers Hans and Tobias Hochstöger grew up. In search of an explanation they speak with the last local eyewitnesses and find Yakov Schwarz, the last survivor, and his family in Israel.
In the small town of Rechnitz a terrible crime against humanity was performed during the holocaust. Until now, no-one dares to talk about it.
Documentary about three female footballers from the Austrian football club FC Blau Weiß Linz - Union Kleinmünchen. The film portrays the athletes and their fight for recognition and equality in male-dominated football.
Der Stoff, aus dem Träume sind
September 11, 1898: The imperial family’s personal physician, Dr. Herman Widerhofer, is deeply shocked by the news that an anarchist has assassinated Empress Elisabeth in Geneva. He then shuts himself up in his private rooms and recalls the empress’ fateful life. We learn the truth about Elisabeth, as the doctor knew more about her than anyone else.
Filmed at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Cut Piece documents one of Yoko Ono’s most powerful conceptual pieces. Performed by the artist herself, Ono sits motionless on the stage after inviting the audience to come up and cut away her clothing in a denouement of the reciprocity between victim and assailant.
In Baden-Baden, Nayo Titzin follows the producers of the opera Don Giovanni, created for the Innsbruck Festival of 2006. He is looking for a musical truth... What if Mozart's masterwork Don Giovanni had been interpreted in a wrong way for more than two centuries? Conductor René Jacobs, famous for his performance of Così fan tutte and laureate of a Grammy Award for his innovative recording of The Marriage of Figaro, comes back with new ideas on the comprehension of one of the greatest operas of all times. In this relevant documentary, Nayo Titzin clarifies and highlights all the brightness of those melodies and recitatives. Rewarded with many praises in the international press, this production shows the dramaturgical perfection of the "opera of the operas," the absolute of the genre, as Wagner once said. Once more, the Bulgarian director offers a fun and subtle report, and makes sure that everyone will understand this myth.
A camera crew follows Helmut Newton, the fashion and ad photographer whose images of tall, blond, big-breasted women are part of the iconography of twentieth-century erotic fantasy. He's on the go from L.A., to Paris, to Monte-Carlo, to Berlin, where he was a youth until he escaped from the Nazis in 1936. We see him on shoots, interviewing models, and discussing his work.