21. UNDER|DOX 08 – 14 OKT 2026

Jan Soldat AT, DE 2026 | German Premiere
15 min | German

He was what you might call an eccentric actor. Whenever he stepped in front of the camera, he brought his own world with him. And for the duration of his appearance, he took over the film. Alfred Edel (1932–1993), the maverick of New German Cinema, left no room for anyone else – and why should he? Soldat dedicates a thoroughly stimulating compilation of archive footage to this brilliant dilettante. – Viennale

Dagie Brundert DE 2025 | 1. Prize German Competition, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen | 8 min | Super 8 | English, German

Set in Derek Jarman’s cottage in a little village in England, where the most beautiful pebbles can be found. And in the most delightful way, the oracle is parodied – one the director discovers in the meadows behind the house, where her neighbour Audry hangs out fresh laundry every day to flutter in the wind. The Super 8 footage is enchanting, as are the light guitar strains and the voice with which the off-screen narrator recites her travelogue, first in German, then in English. – Dunja Bialas

Philipp Hartmann DE 2026 | German Premiere | Flash Award, FID Marseille
30 min | 16mm | German, Spanish

An ageing filmmaker with failing eyesight waits for his wife in a car park. Nestled between a building site and a supermarket, an electronics discount store and a car wash, he reflects – on the experiences shared over lunch and on the bench in the sun next to Aldi, on events elsewhere in the wider world, on special offers and on film projects that never came to fruition. A portrait of and by a non-place. Filmed on hand-developed 16mm film. – Philipp Hartmann

Ulu Braun DE 2026 | World Premiere
17 min | no dialogue

“Electric Birds” lays bare the anthropocentric filters through which we perceive our environment. The film contrasts nature and civilisation, depicting landscapes in transition – where forests are turned into planks and power lines slice through the sky. As the perspectives shift between bird, camera and human, the viewer is drawn into a parallel world of archaic existence. An intensification of the senses disrupts familiar ways of seeing and tentatively tunes into the birds’ frequency. – Ulu Braun

Julien Rivoire FR 2026 | Weltpremiere
6 min | animation | no dialogue

Inspired by an Orientalist aesthetic and by images from Gaza, I seek to undermine the colonial imagination. Each individual image is carefully crafted, then erased, smudged, wiped away, torn up and reworked time and again over several days on the same sheet of paper. The soundtrack combines Palestinian voices with the sounds of Israeli drones, taken from videos on social media. – Julien Rivoire

Siegfried A. Fruhauf AT 2026
15 min | animation | no dialogue

Footage of a toy zebra is cut, pasted, reversed and manipulated to the point of illegibility. The supposed ‘truth’ that the film promises depends on framing, context and motives. This medium is inherently unreliable, slippery and subject to change. It’s even in the title: swap the letters around quickly, and ‘Flim’ becomes ‘Film’. – Chris Clarke

tuesday 13 oct 18:00 theatiner
with James Benning, EIGHT BRIDGES

Johann Lurf AT, FR 2026 | 21 min | 65mm | no dialogue

An experiment in time, light and space: 22 months, day and night through all the seasons – the same yet ever-changing view of the Ottenstein Reservoir in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, captured by the 70mm Wizard Lurf. With his self-built camera – which autonomously combines light metering with still and moving images – and the constantly flowing subsonic soundscape by Jung An Tagen, he sets the screen alight and, almost in passing, defines what holds this fragile creature known as cinema together at its very core. – Bernd Brehmer

Markus Mischkowski & Christos Dassios DE 2026 | 3 min | 16mm | no dialogue

One could interpret these three and a half minutes as a re-enactment and homage to Kenneth Anger’s 1965 classic Kustom Kar Kommandos; yet here and now, it is no longer simply a matter of examining the homoerotic undertones of men’s love for cars. Rather, this nostalgic twist focuses on experimental film itself and on the GDR, from which the Wartburg hails – and not by chance. But is this love? Parody or deconstruction? The answer remains unclear. – Oberhausen Short Film Festival

Nicolás Zukerfeld AR 2026 | German Premiere | 10 min | 16mm | Spanish

A man dives into a lake in a park in Buenos Aires, and nobody sees him resurface. Taking this enigmatic and mysterious news brief as his starting point – the meaning of which becomes all the more obscure the deeper one tries to get to the bottom of it – Nicolás Zukerfeld crafts a film that unfolds less like an investigation and more like a ramble. – FID Marseille

Nicolás Zukerfeld AR 2026 | German Premiere | 5 min | 16mm | no dialogue

A book divided into three chapters and comprising 128 pages. A film with 3,420 frames per second, shot on 16mm film using a Bolex H16 Rex. Perhaps the quest for immortality is precisely that: an attempt to capture a whole that is at once impossible and fragmentary. – Synchro Film Fest

Rainer Knepperges DE 2026 | World Premiere | 5 min | German

Cologne is the only place in Germany where astronauts are trained. Astronaut Matthias Maurer, project manager at the Luna facility in Cologne, is giving a radio interview.