Michael Seeber

Everything Will Not Be Fine

The frankest of films from within a shelter for homeless women. Their stories usually combine domestic violence or acrimonious divorce, with mental fragility. Sonja is trying to make contact with her estranged children. Rula, is unsuccessfully trying to build a home with a new husband. This doc offers a unique window into their world. An evocative reminder of the fragility of human existence, and the value of a stable psyche.

The Trial

At 6am on May 21, 2008, armed police burst into the apartment of Austrian dog trainer and animal-rights activist Sabine Koch, arresting her. After three months in custody, Koch, together with 12 other animal-rights activists, went on trial. They were charged with being members of a criminal organisation and therefore breaching article 273a of the Austrian Penal Code, introduced in the wake of 9/11. The article’s intention is to allow the state to stifle terrorist activity. Years of observation, house searches, and undercover agents – the police left no stone unturned in its bid to prove the animal-rights activists’ guilt. The sobering result: five million Euros worth of investigation, no proof and a great deal of scepticism towards the Austrian justice system – and democracy itself.

Step on It

Evi, a young single mother, works as a seasonal waitress in a winter sports village. She is young and wants to live on the edge and get all the enjoyment she can out of life. When she drinks, Evi feels completely herself, free and inhibited. But her excesses reveal themselves to be the ticking of a time bomb.

Lovely Rita

Rita is an outcast teenager in suburban Austria, misunderstood both at school, where she's disdained by classmates, and at home, where her staunchly religious mother and temperamental father bemoan her inability to fit in with their comfortable bourgeois life. When Rita sets out to seduce her school bus driver, she sets in motion a series of events that changes everyone's lives irrevocably.

Daydream Nation

Garbage men. Garbage women. They swarm out daily to eliminate the excrement of the good life from the metropolitan circuits. The film documents the thorny path from a Viennese civil servant's comfortable life into the Privatopia of Greater Los Angeles. Our protagonists are five trash collectors. They live in Vienna, Genova, Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles.

Luna Papa

The unborn child of Mamlakat is telling her story. She is 17, beautiful and vivacious, and dreaming secretly of becoming an actress. She lives with her father and brother in a small village in Central Asia. One night she is seduced by an actor from a travelling troupe, who poses as a friend of Tom Cruise, and makes her pregnant. She tries to abort, but her father and brother become determined to find the seducer, setting in motion a cascade of comic adventures.

Ein Zufall im Paradies

We do not doubt the existence of humans. On the other hand, we still do not know why we exist or how we came into existence. This film deals with man's eternal dream to discover his origins.

Der Speckjäger

"The Treasure Hunter" is a portrait of writer, publisher and book collector Hermann Gail, who in his youth gave up on life as the result of a terrible sin. He was saved through an unconditional devotion to art.

Am Stein

Documentary about farmers in the Austrian Alps.

Total Therapy

Nine persons sign up for a self-awareness course at an isolated country estate. Dr. Romero, a charismatic therapist, and his assistants confront the patients with their problems. Cut off from the rest of the world, the participants are increasingly drawn into the therapy's spell.

R.I.P. Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman

R.I.P Rest in Pieces is an intimate portrait of artist Joe Coleman, who is known around the world as a shamanic, moral voice diagnosing the ills of 21st century America. Coleman holds nothing back, telling us of a world wracked with tumorous cities, perversion, divorce, violence, atomic bombs, and a human race destroying itself simply because we are born.

Achtung Staatsgrenze

A film about jailed refugees waiting for deportation and the many conflicts which affect their personal fates, the efforts of refugee organizations and the problems of the affected authorities.

Kollek

Chronicles the life of one of Israel's founding fathers, Teddy Kollek, from his days as a Zionist leader to his rescue of 3,000 Jews and his 29 years as mayor of Jerusalem.

Emigration N.Y.

When Hitler's infamous "Anschluss" annexed Austria to Germany in 1938, the lives of 130,000 Jewish Austrians were placed at risk. Over the next three years, some 30,000 managed to emigrate to the United States, settling mainly in New York City. In Austrian filmmaker Egon Humer's brilliant and moving documentary EMIGRATION N.Y., twelve Viennese Jews -- seven women, five men -- recount their lives as children in Austria, as emigrants, as New Yorkers. Deceptively simple in style, the film gathers striking emotional power as its subjects (who include Amos Vogel, co-founder of the New York Film Festival) offer fresh and often surprising views on their experience of exile and assimilation.

The Way to Eden

"What happens with a person after his death? What does the final destination look like? What happens with our bodies? How are we prepared for our last voyage?" A film on how we deal with death. The aging and the decay of the body, free of taboos. Death as a part of life and as the last companion. Janos Keser, the modern Charon, occupation: master of dissecting.

Gehorsam und Verweigerung

Industrial mass murder in the Third Reich, atrocities in other wars, cruelty perpetrated by "normal" citizens: "obedience" appears to be the key to this behavior.

Rätsel Zeit

A human being has no sensory organ for time. We perceive it, and what is it which we are perceiving thereby? To what extent does our contemporary society influence the way we experience it? Why has time become a dominating factor in the mordern world?

Kameni Grad - Stadt aus Stein

A hot summer in Vienna: Kameni Grad - City of Stone. Four groups of young people, whose parents come from the former Yugoslavia: Alma and Mircla, Sascha and Dragan, Nenad and his friends, and Marina and her little brother Branko. A subculture which, full of confidence, integrates itself into the local community, yet without denying its origins.

Running Wild

A flare shoots through the night. "Red brothers" against right-wing extremists; immigrant groups against right-wing "louts"; knives and tear-gas against baseball bats. "WADADENG, WADADENG, listen to my 9 mm go BANG" ... Rap and hip-hop in Vienna.