“From the Heart of Europe: Austria on Screen” promises to bring “an eclectic mix from hard-hitting drama to absurdist comedy” to the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival, which kicked off on Wednesday and runs through March 9.
Across 12 days, Scotland’s largest annual celebration of cinema will bring out such stars as James McAvoy, Ed Harris, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth, George MacKay and Formula 1 star Damon Hill, and screen 92 world, U.K. and Scottish premieres from 39 countries, including the Austrian showcase as part of this year’s country’s focus that puts a spotlight on new cinematic voices as well as legendary filmmaker Michael Haneke.
“We have been noticing over the past years that Austrian films were really starting to make waves on the festival circuit,” Christopher Kumar, the Glasgow Film Festival‘s program coordinator tells THR.
The Glasgow team worked with the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, the Roland Teichmann-led Austrian Film Insitute, and Austrian Films. “We watched a broad selection of films, and then [London-based film distributor] Curzon told me they would be re-releasing some of Michael Haneke’s titles [Hidden, The Piano Teacher] in spring, and it seemed the perfect mix to highlight to our audience the new and established filmmaking talent of Austria,” explains Allison Gardner, CEO of Glasgow Film and director of the Glasgow Film Festival.
The fest programmers also laud the diversity in genres and storytelling on display in the Austria focus. “All the films feel very different in tone and subject matter. That’s what is so exciting about the films we have chosen,” Gardner adds. “From documentaries to dramas, the standard for filmmaking is really high.”
Echoes Kumar: “I think all of the titles are honing in on the world we live in today and how we as humans deal with the ever-changing landscape. The films all take different approaches to tackling this idea.”
Here is a closer look at the Austrian movies that the Glasgow Festival will put center stage.
Andrea Gets a Divorce (Andrea lässt sich scheiden)
Directed by Josef Hader
The soil of the Austrian countryside is rich with tragicomedy in writer-director-star Hader’s second feature as a director after 2017’s Wild Mouse. In Andrea Gets a Divorce, hope turns into a whole set of emotions as a countryside policewoman yearning for a promotion faces a moral quandary after accidentally killing her soon-to-be-ex in a hit-and-run accident.
Birgit Minichmayr, who in 2009 won the Silver Bear for best actress at the Berlin Film Festival for her work in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else, stars as the cop Andrea. She thinks her life’s on the up, with the prospect of a promotion to a bigger town where she wants to leave her old life and failed marriage behind. Then she accidentally runs over her soon-to-be-ex (portrayed by Austrian stand-up comedian and actor Thomas Stipsits) and flees the scene.
Hader, a household name in Austria for his work as a comedian on stage, won the best actor honor at the Locarno Film Festival for his role in Hold-Up in 2000. Just like in Wild Mouse, he is a triple threat here as writer, together with Florian Kloibhofer, director and star.
Hader tells THR that he is very familiar with the small-town, countryside setting of the film from his own childhood: “I know it very well because I grew up in the country, and it became a film about the many needle pricks that I may have suffered as a very sensitive child in the country.”
The comedian-turned-filmmaker is looking forward to seeing the reaction of Scottish audiences to his film and to gauging how well his story translates and travels. “I find Glasgow particularly exciting to see whether the movie also works across the pond,” Hader tells THR. “So far, my impression has been that there is something like an international European province. This means that a film from the [Austrian region] Weinviertel is also easily understandable for people in northern France or northern Germany who, interestingly enough, not only recognized the problems but also, in a certain way, recognized the mentality of the people in the film.”
Gina
Directed by Ulrike Kofler
Ready to explore the impact of poverty through a child’s eyes? Kofler, who has made a name for herself as a director (What We Wanted) and an editor (on the likes of Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Kreutzer’s The Ground Beneath My Feet, and Josef Hader’s Wild Mouse), takes the audience on a journey through a childhood that is not as happy as we all may want to expect in the heart of Europe.
Emma Lotta Simmer, in her film debut, plays the nine-year-old Gina in the family drama. She is forced to grow up fast in a household overseen by her alcoholic mother, played by Marie-Luise Stockinger (Maria Theresia). “Gina takes care of her two siblings as she tries to navigate the unpredictability of a home that often has no food on the table,” reads a synopsis.
“The sensitive and well-observed drama offers a child’s eye view of life with a pregnant and single mum of three who is struggling with addiction while trying to make ends meet,” the Glasgow Festival website notes. “Kofler gives a clear-sighted view of the impact of a dysfunctional lifestyle that has been passed down from mother to daughter while also suggesting change is possible.”
Peacock (Pfau – Bin ich echt?)
Directed by Bernhard Wenger
Peacock, Wenger’s colorful feature directing debut, turned heads when it strutted into the Venice Critics’ Week last year. Gardner saw the film at Venice “and thought it was brilliant,” she recalls, describing the experience as a key driver of putting together the Austria focus for Glasgow. “I wanted to see more of what [Austria] had to offer.”
Peacock stars Albrecht Schuch, who audiences know from the likes of Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front, Andreas Kleinert’s Dear Thomas, and Nora Fingscheidt’s System Crasher, among others, Anton Noori, and Julia Franz Richter, who was recently featured as one of THR‘s 2025 Berlin Film Festival Rising Stars.
Schuch stars as a man who rents out his time to others who need companionship. “Matthias (Schuch) is a master of performance, slipping seamlessly into any role demanded by his rent-a-companion company’s clients — from art-loving boyfriend to Good Samaritan and dutiful son,” explains a film synopsis. But “his people-pleasing attitude has become so extreme that his girlfriend Sophia (Richter) begins to wonder if there’s any of the ‘real’ him left, plunging Matthias into an existential crisis.”
Wenger read about rent-a-friend agencies in Japan in an article in The New Yorker more than 10 years ago and thought that after his film education and short films, the topic would be interesting for a feature film. “Self-presentation is a huge topic in our society. If we take a look at social media, where everybody presents themselves in the best light, it has really become a problem,” he tells THR. “It is okay to take on different roles at work and at home with your family, but when you are a different person in this one group of friends and a different person in the other group of friends, then you are not being real to yourself, and that’s where fakeness and superficiality comes in.”
Wenger’s work has drawn comparisons to the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos and Ruben Östlund. “On the one hand, it’s a huge honor to be compared to these great filmmakers,” he says. “On the other hand, you really want to be known as a person yourself. But what these filmmakers and many others I really admire all have in common is that they are working in the genre of satire. And I love to work with humor and talk about important social topics with the audience.”
Piggy Bank (Sparschwein)
Directed by Christoph Schwarz
And now for something completely different: Schwarz plays himself as a down-on-his-luck Austrian filmmaker who accepts an offer from the country’s public broadcaster to participate in a documentary series called Striking Years, which involves him living as a climate activist without money for a year.
“But does Schwarz really want to document his self-experiment as a climate activist?” asks a synopsis. “Wouldn’t it be better to reorient the long-term experiment into a critique of capitalism and secretly buy the desired weekend house with the film budget?” He ends up blowing all the cash on the new house for his family.
The result is what Schwarz’s website calls “a self-mocking film about double standards, which playfully and humorously shows that the problems you clear away, are often smaller than the new ones that you thereby create.” But while skewering performative activism and middle-class idealism and apathy in “a playful hybrid,” as the Glasgow website notes, the film also offers up “serious observations on the climate crisis.”
Schwarz developed his own artistic and cinematic style over time. “I started with this auto-fictitious filmmaking where I’m the protagonist and mainly do everything myself in 2010 with a 12-minute movie (called Supercargo) about being the only person on board of a container freighter to China,” he tells THR. “And I made another short film every year, and they became longer and longer. So the last one was 35 minutes long. So I felt I had to try to make a feature film in my film language.”
The film title Piggy Bank also has a history, Schwarz shares. “It’s the perfect example of a working title that you cannot get rid of. The working title played with this idea that somebody has a moral dilemma and ambiguous moral perspectives,” he explains. “But at the same time, in the very beginning of the film, you see me crashing the piggy bank of my daughter. I had a hard time with this title because I thought that maybe it was a bit too silly. So, I had several other ideas for titles. But if you use a working title for so long, for four years, you cannot get rid of it anymore.”
Veni Vidi Vici
Directed by Julia Niemann and Daniel Hoesl
Filmmakers German Niemann and Austrian Hoesl, who also collaborated on the 2020 film Davos, aren’t afraid to take aim at the super-rich and powerful. Just as the rich in their film are not afraid to take shots at regular people — literally!
“The Maynards and their children lead an almost perfect billionaire family life,” notes a synopsis of the movie, which world premiered at Sundance 2024 and was produced by Ulrich Seidl. Father Amon, played by Laurence Rupp (Barbarians, Vienna Blood), is a passionate hunter who “has taken up the ultimate hobby — killing random humans” with the help of his butler Alfred (Markus Schleinzer). And he makes little secret of his murderous hobby. After all, Amon has “enough money to get away with just about anything — even random murders.” And at least one of his daughters seems ready to follow in his footsteps and go for the kill.
Written by Hoesl (Un gran casino, WINWIN), the film’s ensemble cast includes Ursina Lardi as mother Viktoria and Olivia Goschler as daughter Paula.
“This is a film about the power of billionaires and, on the other hand, the price of money, which 99 percent of us are dealing with,” Hoesl says. “And our film starts with a quote by Ayn Rand, a very important figure for libertarian thinking: ‘The point is, who will stop me?’ And now look what’s going on in the U.S. and elsewhere.”
Thanks to the Glasgow Festival spotlight on Austrian film, the Veni Vidi Vici filmmakers will return to Britain after a while. “It’s the first time for us to be back since Brexit,” Hoesl mentions. “The last time I was in the U.K., I was at Parliament Square on Brexit night, standing in front of Nigel Farage. So, this time I will go to Scotland, and I’m really excited. What comes to mind is Trainspotting and the (Iggy Pop) song (Lust for Life). You know: Here comes Johnny Yen again, with the liquor and drugs and the flash machine, he’s gonna do another striptease.’ So I expect that to happen!”
Hidden (Caché) and The Piano Teacher (La pianiste)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Glasgow’s “From the Heart of Europe” program also brings two classics from “one of Austria’s most famous and audacious filmmakers” to the festival — Michael Haneke.
In The Piano Teacher (2001), Isabelle Huppert stars as a sexually repressed teacher romantically pursued by one of her students, and the thriller Hidden (Caché) (2005), starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as a couple tormented by a stranger keeping them under constant surveillance.
Piano Teacher won the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix and acting prizes for Huppert and her co-star Benoît Magimel. “Haneke’s adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial 1983 novel is a cool dissection of control dynamics that is still potently thought-provoking more than two decades later,” says the Glasgow Festival website.
Four years after The Piano Teacher won its trio of prizes in Cannes, Haneke’s Hidden opened the festival and took home another three awards, including best director. “A married couple’s comfortable lifestyle begins to implode after they start to receive surveillance tapes of their home,” notes Glasgow’s website, calling the movie “a grippingly tense triumph.”
Original Source: Read More Here
