30.04.2024 – 05.05.2024
Every year in April, the CROSSING EUROPE Film Festival Linz dedicates its programme to unconventional, contemporary and socio-political auteur cinema from Europe.
Despite changes in media consumption and reception behaviour, film festivals continue to play an important role: presenting new positions and developments in film art to a wider public for discussion, curating programmes and films which, despite international festival successes, all too often have no place in the cinema for economic reasons, and creating an audience for them. This also includes the presentation of films by a young generation of directors.
With the programme selection, festival director Christine Dollhofer tries to do justice to the diversity of European cinema (and thus the European continent). The Linz festival audience has the opportunity to see high-quality European productions and film highlights from the past festival season (from A-list festivals such as the Berlinale, Cannes and Venice) presented on the big screen. Over the six days of the festival, CROSSING EUROPE offers around 160 outstanding, hand-picked feature and documentary films.
With “anton bruckner 2024”, this year’s Upper Austrian year of culture is centred around the 200th anniversary of the music giant’s birth.
Under the direction of Jutta Strohmaier, photography and media artist and professor at the University of Art and Design Linz, and the renowned filmmaker Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Anton Bruckner and his work will be brought closer to a young audience and the interested public through artistic and cinematic approaches as part of the project Die Phantastische. Students from the University of Art and Design Linz will “tune” the approaches to the musical oeuvre of the composer by means of analogue, digital and performative interpretations, montages and transformations, reflecting specifically on pop-cultural forms such as music videos, social media tools and AI applications.
This year, the Crossing Europe programme Worlds of Work focuses on real working conditions in contemporary Europe. Under this year’s thematic focus entitled Vocation: Change!, four documentary films place people at the centre whose professional activities flow seamlessly into activist action – sometimes more, sometimes less voluntarily or intentionally. For example, the 2024 film series provides an insight into the work of female journalists in crisis regions who are confronted with patriarchal structures, dictatorial regimes and terrorist organisations, or follows the relationship between a drag performer and a lawyer for LGBTIQA+ rights who simply want to lead a normal life in the queer-hostile majority society in Armenia.
Opening and closing films have been selected
With DOMAḰINSTVO ZA POČETNICI / HOUSEKEEPING FOR BEGINNERS, Goran Stolevski delivers a powerful, tragicomic portrait of an unconventional family and tells the story of being both Roma and queer in North Macedonia. The film (starring Anamaria Marinca and Alina Șerban, among others) celebrated its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. The Berlinale title ELLBOGEN / ELBOW, Aslı Özarslan’s film adaptation of Fatma Aydemir’s novel of the same name, depicts 18-year-old Hazal’s gripping search for identity and belonging. GERLACH is the new documentary film by Aliona van der Horst, to whom this year’s Tribute programme is dedicated, and Luuk Bouwman. With poetic imagery, the two portray one of the last old-school Dutch arable farmers who is fighting back against the industry that is oppressing him. The film won the IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film in 2023. In the prelude to the Night Vision programme section, Tilman Singer’s CUCKOO, US shooting star Hunter Schafer lives through an absurd and stylish nightmare against a cliché backdrop in the Bavarian Alps. The film celebrated its world premiere at the Berlinale.
On 5 May, the 21st edition of the festival will conclude with another Berlinale title and Pia Hierzegger in a leading role: Eva Trobisch’s IVO deals with the topics of death and euthanasia at eye level and follows the professional and private everyday life of a palliative care nurse (Minna Wündrich). The feature film will be released in Austrian cinemas on 21 June.
CROSSING EUROPE Filmfestival 2024
30.04.2024 – 05.05.2024
various locations, Linz
www.crossingeurope.at
