Norika Sefa is a Kosovan writer, director, and editor. Her feature debut, LOOKING FOR VENERA (2021), premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it received the Tiger Award, establishing Sefa as one of the most distinctive emerging voices in contemporary European cinema. Prior to her feature debut, Sefa directed the hybrid documentary DESDE ARRIBA (2020), filmed in the Peruvian Amazon under the guidance of Werner Herzog. Her latest short film, LIKE A SICK YELLOW (2024), continues her exploration of experimental forms, blending documentary and avant-garde practices through a bold visual and narrative approach. Alongside her artistic work, she is actively involved in film education, giving lectures, workshops, and has served as a jury member for numerous film festivals. She is a member of the European Film Academy (EFA).
I chose, across different countries, years, and cinematic traditions, films that treat cinema not as an explanation, but as a way of unsettling reality. “Poor images” make visible what we are used to seeing without questioning. (Norika Sefa, curator of the programme)
Programm:
AND WE ALL SHINE ON is an experimental collage that transforms found imagery, layered landscapes, and karaoke into an eerie meditation on media, belief, and apocalypse. A mysterious drift through the material blurs memory, myth, and deception, while exposing the emotional power and danger of mediated images and spiritual longing.
US 2006, Michael Robinson, 7’, no dialogue, DCP
2020 is a brief, concentrated portrait in which Friedl vom Gröller’s characteristic attention to faces, presence, and duration becomes almost tactile. In its minimal form, the film turns a fleeting encounter into a meditation on looking, memory, and the fragile trace of a moment.
POV MEMORY explores human memory through the unstable perspective of digital memory where recorded experience becomes fragmented, reconstructed, and estranged. Blurring the boundaries
between personal archive, perception, and virtual space, the film reflects on how contemporary technologies reshape the way memories are formed and recalled.
S/T is a luminous, meditative study of light, movement, and duration in which everyday reality is transformed into pure cinematic sensation. With this film, Caldini reduces cinema to its elemental qualities, inviting viewers to experience image and time as physical, almost transcendental phenomena.
I CHANGE I AM THE SAME is a playful one-minute experimental film in which a man and a woman repeatedly exchange clothes, blurring the visual markers of gender and identity. Through simple transformations, it questions how much identity depends on appearance rather than the person beneath. Despite constant change, the film suggests that something essential remains the same.
US 1969, Alice Anne Parker, Shelby Kennedy, 1’, no dialogue, DCP
I WOULD RATHER BE A STONE explores memory, landscape, and inherited histories through a poetic encounter with voices, images, and material traces. Moving between personal and collective forms of remembrance, the film reflects on the weight of the past and the ways bodies, places, and stories carry what cannot be fully articulated.
HR 2024, Ana Hušman, 24’, OV with English subtitles, DCP
EXTRA TERRESTRIAL is a hypnotic experimental journey that investigates perception, trance,
and the limits of the visible. Through a carefully constructed encounter between image, sound, and landscape, Russell creates a space where documentary observation slips into the hallucinatory, questioning what it means to experience and record another reality.
XK 2002, Sokol Beqiri, 3’, no dialogue, DCP, Lender: Kontakt Collection, Vienna
SUPERMAN is a concise and provocative gesture that uses the figure of the superhero as a symbol of power, vulnerability, and collective imagination. Through a simple yet unsettling visual intervention, Beqiri questions ideas of heroism, identity, and the desire for transcendence within a fractured reality.
F1GHTING LOOKS DIFFERENT 2 ME NOW is a vibrant experimental collage that moves through memory, resistance, and transformation using fragments of sound, image, and personal archive. The film challenges fixed narratives of identity and history, creating a space where struggle becomes a form of survival yet is always on edge, constantly shifting trying to become something else, refusing to settle into a single form or meaning.
| Sun 20 September 2026 | Luru Kino |
| 7 PM | Ordinary Errors: everything about yourself AND WE ALL SHINE ON US 2006, Michael Robinson, 7’, no dialogue, DCP 2020 AT 2021, Friedl vom Gröller, 2’, no dialogue, DCP POV MEMORY SG/AZ 2023, Igor Smola, 13’, OV with English subtitles, DCP S/T CA 2007, Claudio Caldini, 3’, silent, DCP I CHANGE I AM THE SAME US 1969, Alice Anne Parker, Shelby Kennedy, 1’, no dialogue, DCP I WOULD RATHER BE A STONE HR 2024, Ana Hušman, 24’, OV with English subtitles, DCP EXTRA TERRESTRIAL US 2004, Rhyne Piggott, Ben Russell, 11’, no dialogue, DCP SUPERMAN XK 2002, Sokol Beqiri, 3’, no dialogue, DCP, Lender: Kontakt Collection, Vienna F1GHTING LOOKS DIFFERENT 2 ME NOW Mesa Grande Reservation/US 2022, Fox Maxy, 11’, English OV, DCP With an introduction by curator Norika Sefa € 7,5 (6,5 reduced) |
Avantgarde Now! and Then! sixpackfilm from Vienna
Viktoria Schmid’s films operate at the intersection of experimental film, installation and media reflection. At the heart of her works lie the fundamental elements of the cinematic apparatus – camera, editing, lighting, film material and screen – which Schmid treats not merely as technical prerequisites, but as independent aesthetic factors creating meaning in their own right. Thus, her films engage with the cinematic dispositif by making visible the interplay between perception and projection, pictorial space and materiality. Street canyons, skyscrapers and water towers: The iconography of New York’s urban landscape is well known. In NYC RGB however, Schmid shows us New York City as we have never seen it before. She has triple-exposed the analogue film stock using different colour filters – first red, then green, and finally blue – thereby fusing colours, architecture and time into a completely new form of perception. NYC RGB and ROJO ZALJA BLAU are part of a series of works in which Schmid explores early filming techniques, historical colouring processes in analogue film and 16mm footage “cut” in-camera.
In W O W (KODAK), she compiles and manipulates amateur footage of the partial demolition of Eastman Business Park in Rochester, New York. Once a global centre for analogue photography, the site’s redundant film production facilities were reduced to rubble and ashes. On the one hand, the demolition shown here is a radical expression of media shift towards the digital. At the same time, the reverse playback of the footage – one of the earliest special effects techniques in film history—articulates a longing for the continuation of analogue media. For A PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN SCOPE, Schmid set up a screen in Cinemascope – the widest aspect ratio, which was increasingly used in the Western genre – on a barren dune on the Lithuanian coast. The film simultaneously portrays the landscape while documenting the intervention in the natural environment. Schmidt filmed this site-specific installation at various times of the day, turning the screen into a projection surface for the shadows of the surrounding trees and bushes. A cinema without film.
| Sat 19 September 2026 | Luru Kino |
| 8 PM | Light, colour, time – the films of Viktoria Schmid ROJO ZALJA BLAU AT 2025, 10′, DCP NYC RGB AT/US 2023, 7′, DCP KATHARINAVIKTORIA 2(021) AT 2021, 1′, DCP A PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN SCOPE AT/LT 2020, 8′, DCP W O W (KODAK) AT 2018, 3′, DCP A TAMA FOR EKTACHROME AT 2016, 1’, DCP A PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN 4:3 AT 2016, 2′, DCP IT’S A DANCE AT 2014, 2′, DCP KATHARINAVIKTORIA AT 2011, 1′, DCP ACHTUNG / HALLO 35 AT 2010, 2′, 35mm GOLAN AT 2012, 2’, 16mm FOODFILMS AT 2010, 8′, 16mm In presence of Viktoria Schmid and Dietmar Schwärzler € 7,50 (6,50 reduced) |
Avantgarde Now! and Then! sixpackfilm from Vienna
Sasha Pirker’s wittily choreographed short film explores the connections between the history of women in early cinema, the 100th anniversary of the 16mm format, contemporary despots such as Putin, Trump, Netanyahu or Erdogan, the Pavlova cake, and political activism. In his meticulously researched “gathered footage” piece, Jan Soldat pays homage to the actor Alfred Edel, a key figure of the New German Cinema: Soldat weaves together fragments of dialogue from a wide variety of the actor’s films and roles into a coherent narrative that distils and showcases the actor’s typology or typologies. Rom Sheratzky, meanwhile, uses a public live-stream camera in Frankfurt/Main to get closer to his love interest – an endeavour oscillating between shameless romantic bliss and a tingling sense of unease. There are no consequences – this could be the refreshing motto of Emma Hütt and Tina Muffler’s fast-paced and exhilarating short feature film about friendship, love and quick sex. A queer road movie, set between a petrol station and Germany’s oldest lesbian bar (La Gata in Frankfurt/Main). (Dietmar Schwärzler)
| Fri 18 September 2026 | Luru Kino |
| 8 PM | Found Footage, Torten und Sex EVERYONE DESERVES A SLICE OF THE PIE AT 2025, D: Sasha Pirker, 17’, OV with english subs, DCP DER ANGRIFF DES ALFRED EDEL AUF SICH SELBST AT/DE 2025, D: Jan Soldat, 15’, OV with english subs, DCP FOLLOW BACK AT/DE 2025, D: Rom Sheratzky, 23’, OV with english subs, DCP BLEIFREI 95 DE/AT 2025, D: Emma Hütt, Tina Muffler, 24’, OV with english subs, DCP In the presence of Ursula Pürrer and Dietmar Schwärzler € 7,50 (6,50 reduced) |
Avantgarde Now! and Then! sixpackfilm from Vienna
Legend has it that by the end of the premiere of ARNULF RAINER, not a single person was left in the auditorium. Peter Kubelka’s film is now regarded as one of the classics of structural cinema. The witty film and media miniatures by Ernst Schmidt Jr. and Peter Weibel play with the audience and call into question the very apparatus within which they take place. Working with the (naked) body is a prominent stylistic element in the visual arts of Austrian (post-war) history; the Viennese Actionists were particularly influential – Günter Brus, who uses his own body, the most lasting and interesting position within this group. With their feminist perspective on self-empowerment, VALIE EXPORT, Mara Mattuschka, Linda Christanell, Ashley Hans Scheirl and Ursula Pürrer have expanded and reinterpreted Viennese Actionism. Their frequent use of their own bodies forms the terrain on which great pleasure, but also great pain, is experienced. Moucle Blackout and Maria Lassnig explore the not always congruent interplay between women and men. All of these films explore sensory dimensions of cinema, whilst also serving as political tools to rebel against traditional values. (Dietmar Schwärzler)
| Fri 18 Sept 2026 | Luru Kino |
| 6 PM | ARNULF RAINER AT 1960, R: Peter Kubelka, 7’, 16mm START AT 1973, R: Ernst Schmidt jr., 11 sec, DCP HALLO AT 1964, R: Ernst Schmidt jr., 12 sec, DCP THE LITTLE MACHINE AT 1977, R: Ernst Schmidt jr., 38 sec, DCP HAPPENING AT 1969-1979, R: Ernst Schmidt jr., 11 sec, DCP 10/65 SELBSTVERSTÜMMELUNG AT 1965, R: Kurt Kren, 5’, DCP DIE GEBURT DER VENUS AT 1970-1972, R: Moucle Blackout, 5’, DCP COUPLES AT/US 1972, R: Maria Lassnig, 9’, DCP REMOTE…REMOTE… AT 1973, R: VALIE EXPORT, 10’, DCP KUGELKOPF AT 1985, R: Mara Mattuschka, 6’, DCP ROUGE ET NOIR AT 1993, R: Linda Christanell, 10’, File SEX AND CRIME AT 1984, R: Ursula Pürrer, Ashley Hans Scheirl, 3’, File GEZACKTES RINNSAL SCHLEICHT SICH SCHAMLOS SCHENKELNÄSSEND AN AT 1985, R: Ursula Pürrer, Ashley Hans Scheirl, 4’, File TV-AQUARIUM AT 1970, R: Peter Weibel, 2’, File ABBILDUNG IST EIN VERBRECHEN AT 1970, R: Peter Weibel, 2’, File ZEITBILD (CLUB 2) AT 1979, R: Peter Weibel, 3’, File GLEICHZEITIG NACKT AT 2024, R: Ursula Pürrer, Ashley Hans Scheirl, 3’, DCP In presence of Ursula Pürrer and Dietmar Schwärzler € 7,5 (6,5 reduced) |
Avantgarde Now! and Then! sixpackfilm from Vienna | Milieukino at the Rabet
AT/US 1968-2016, D: Valie Export, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Ursula Pürrer, Eve Heller, Phil Solomon, Jannis Lenz
Starting from the relocation of the cinema into public space, a programme of short films featuring works from the collection of the Viennese film distributor sixpackfilm explores the boundaries between public and private, visible and concealed. Valie Export’s TAPP- UND TASTKINO ironically and provocatively makes “tangible”what voyeurs seek to touch through watching. In a public performance, Export straps a box – a miniature cinema auditorium, open at the front and back – to her bare breasts. Passers-by are invited to visit the cinema… In ASTOR PLACE by Eve Heller, we look through a shop window mirrored on the outside onto the square of the same name in New York City. Passers-by walk past. Unaware that they are being watched, they look into the camera before moving onsoon. An arrangement of asymmetrical gazes that gains in complexity on the big screen. Ursula Pürrer and Ashley Hans Scheierl’s EIN SCHLAUCHBOOT UND AUSTERN is queer DIY cinema: punk women on the New York subway, home-movie snippets and the sexually surreal. The programme is shown as a loop.
| Thu 17 September 2026 | Milieukino at the Rabet |
| 5 PM | Outside in the cinema: short films from sixpackfilm TAPP UND TASTKINO AT 1968, D: VALIE EXPORT , 2’, File EIN SCHLAUCHBOOT UND AUSTERN AT 1985, D: Ashley Hans Scheirl, Ursula Pürrer, 5’, File ASTOR PLACE US 1997, D: Eve Heller, 10’, File CROSSROAD US 2005, D: Phil Solomon, 5’, File SCHWERELOS AT 2016, D: Jannis Lenz, 9’, File Admission: Free donation |
