Diagonal Graz with “Sparti” and “corset”

This year’s Diagonale promises a contradictory and emotional festival. That’s what Co-Artistic Director Peter Schernhuber said yesterday at the program presentation in Vienna. With the current festival edition, Schernhuber says goodbye together with Sebastian Höglinger to the Festival of Austrian Films, which has been taking place in Graz since 1998.

The festival begins on March 21 with the club culture parable, which premiered at the Berlinale “The animal in the jungle” by Patrick Chiha, the short film “NYC RGB” by Viktoria Schmid and the presentation of the Great Diagonale Acting Prize to Margarethe Tiesel. What is new, however, are a number of the 115 Austrian feature, documentary and short films shown in the competition and examples of innovative cinema.

In feature films, Höglinger emphasized horror satire “race nest” by Johannes Grenzfurthner and the “Housing Market Crime” with the title “The landlady” by Sebastian Brauneis as proof of the existence of humor in Austrian cinema. With Ulrich Seidls “Sparti” and Marie Kreutzer’s Sisi relocation “corset” are running two prominent strips in the competition, which due to the way young performers are treated (“Sparti”) as well as des “If Teichtmeister” were intensively discussed and criticized.