New Uncertainties. Austrian Documentary Film in the 1990s Diagonale Guest Programme

New Labour, the Balkan Wars, a new concept of memory, the first WWW server at CERN, the Rio climate summit, and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? The 1990s served as a hinge between the “no-future” ethos of the 1980s and the rapid rise of the Internet.

In Austria, geopolitical shifts coincided with specific domestic political and social upheavals. Structural changes in industry—foreseeable since the 1970s—increasingly challenged the traditional organizational forms of the labor movement. At the same time, Austria was directly affected by the consequences of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. The disintegration of Yugoslavia triggered migration flows that reignited debates about belonging and difference.

These shifts were also reflected in Austrian cinema of the 1990s. A new generation of filmmakers began to question established modes of representation. Twelve films were selected for the historical program *Neue Unsicherheiten* (New Uncertainties)—which premiered in a slightly different lineup at the Diagonale festival in March—to explore these upheavals with formal sophistication; the films document, reflect upon, or simply make visible these transformations. With two exceptions, the works are documentaries that consciously employ diverse formal approaches. This variety points to a key development of the 1990s: the boundaries of the documentary form became porous, and the question of what constitutes a documentary representation became a subject of aesthetic inquiry in itself. (Dominik Kamalzadeh/Claudia Slanar)

In cooperation with Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film

Attended by numerous filmmakers