Jessica Hausner

Miss Novak joins the staff of an international boarding school to teach a conscious eating class and forms a strong bond with five students that eventually takes a dangerous turn.

Alice, a single mother who is more dedicated to her work as a genetic engineer than to her teenage son Joe, develops a new variety of flower that is supposed to have the ability to make its owner happy thanks to its special chemical properties.

Heinrich wishes to conquer death through love, and when he meets Henriette, the wife of a business acquaintance, she expresses interest in a suicide pact when she learns she has a terminal illness.

In order to escape her isolation, wheelchair-bound Christine makes a life changing journey to Lourdes, the iconic site of pilgrimage in the Pyrenees Mountains.

This video installation pays unnervingly close attention to domestic routine, portraying a young woman in the kitchen methodically preparing food. This quotidian ritual slowly comes to feel like a sort of obsessive sublimation of more obscure psychic energies.

Twenty-eight well-known filmmakers living and working in Austria were invited by WIENER MOZARTJAHR 2006, to produce associative miniatures on Mozart. Requirement: they had to be one-minute artistic short films. The directors come from a whole range of different backgrounds, ranging from animated, experimental and short film to documentaries and feature films. The result is a multi-facetted sampler of diverse formal and contextual positions with regard to Mozart’s person and his influence on today’s society, art and culture. The contributions run the gamut from experimental-conceptual statements through socio-critical and documentary observations to pithy short feature films.

When Irene takes a position at a hotel deep in the woods of the Austrian Alps, she soon discovers the girl she replaced vanished without a trace.

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.

A movie about the possibility to be happy—or about the impossibility of the same. A young man interviews people on the street. He asks them about the substance of their lives in order to find answers for himself, but he cannot find any. Then, a young woman: after a couple of disappointments, she finds the happy side of life—she finds something like love. They meet each other…

The heroine of the title grows up. Slights, dance school, a cinema of glances, of tender moments, of trivial pop songs. A cinema which takes time, makes observations and which continuously finds or invents opposite picture sequences for loneliness and breaking free...

A 1993 short film written and directed by Jessica Hausner. The film screened at Diagonale: Festival of Austrian Film in 2020.