The monthly program series "Home Stories" started in November 1998 in cooperation with the Filmcasino in Vienna and was continued from March 2003 as "Home Stories +" in the Topkino. There were - quote from the program folder - "short feature films, documentaries and the avant-garde. Brand new and salvaged treasures from overgrown terrain were shown. The completion of a new, successful festival runner gave rise to a showcase of works and encounters with international productions were sought."
Watching & being Watched!
Wed April 16, 2008, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

I look in the mirror and see myself. I look through the camera and see someone else. I look into the camera, what do I see? These three parameters can be used to outline the films in this program, the common thread of which is the staging of the self or the other.

Kren and Muhr portray the travesty artists Dame Edna and Lucy McEvil, while Scheirl…

Gabriele Mathes / Astrid Ofner
Fri March 7, 2008, 20:00 h
Stadtkino Wien

One million credit is normal, says my grandfather (Gabriele Mathes, 2006, 23 min.)
"... Above all Gabriele Mathes' One million credit is normal says my Grandfather, an oppressive autobiographical essay that uses home movies from the sixties to the eighties and quasi-proto-colloquial off-screen commentary to tell a family story that is essentially c…

Masters of Darkness
Wed March 5, 2008, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

Places such as the forest (Trifter 1) or times such as a night-time thunderstorm (Night Sweat) become eerie when questioned with cinematic means and the horror creeps in. A panicked protagonist flees from strangers (Paranoia Death Valley) into empty houses. The boundary between nightmare and reality becomes blurred; the rooms begin to come alive (…

Films from a Dark Room – Films by Peter Tscherkassky
Wed Feb. 13, 2008, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

Cult worldwide - and yet almost never seen at home: the hand-copied film artworks of the Viennese Peter Tscherkassky. Here now in a complete package: six found footage works from the darkroom! And a premiere of a special kind: the screening of the psychoanalytically inspired work Parallel Space: Inter-View, for the first time in the original 35mm …

Vicious circle
Wed Jan. 23, 2008, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

The circle has been an extremely popular motif throughout film history. As a geometric figure, it dominates animations, whether painted by hand on the film strip (No 2: Message from the Sun), punched directly into celluloid (White) or animated with the computer (image[s]...loss, points of view, iii, Lapis, ORDER-RE-ORDER).
The real world is also ch…

Mind the Gap
Wed Dec. 12, 2007, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

The fairy tale of the same name by the Brothers Grimm forms the starting point for Allerleirauh, which attempts to find an image for the causes of an injury. Also in the tradition of feminist performance art is KIP MASKER, in which Petschnig subverts standardized body representations as both performer and camerawoman. Along three settings, Helen A…

Cityscapes
Wed Nov. 14, 2007, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

The city as a topos of modernity continues to provide fascinating new motifs for film and video art. In particular, architectural constructions, acceleration and movement in the big city challenge formal considerations that represent an extension of everyday, fleeting perception.

Together with Martin Reinhard, Christoph Brunner developed his own …

Recordings
Wed Oct. 10, 2007, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

Hotel Diaries is the name John Smith has given to his ongoing series of video recordings, which - each recorded late at night in different hotel rooms in Europe - place what he has just personally experienced in the context of current or historical (world) political events. In her video, Hito Steyerl has employees of the Film Museum in Sarajevo re…

From Hernals to Simmering
Wed Sept. 12, 2007, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

"For us, Simmering is not just the 11th district. Simmering stands for a way of life." The text insert at the beginning of the film testifies to an attitude, as does the return of the slow zoom-in: Alexander Schukoff and Reinhard Kofler encounter the suburb of Simmering, its pubs, ghettos, concrete housing estates; the vegetable market, the marsha…

A Sixpack Space Odyssee
Wed June 20, 2007, 19:00 h
Top-Kino

A glance out of the compartment window, a moment of doubt: is it us, or is it the neighboring train? Thomas Fuerhapter's subway puzzle Planes or Turk/Stöger's dizzying desert panorama paradox_paradise may have been inspired by everyday life's minor loss of orientation. The feeling of losing one's own, imagined point of view is uncanny, be it …