The actress Libgart Schwarz is on her way to a meeting. The play Kaspar is to be filmed. During rehearsals, she suddenly loses her language.

Amina Handke’s first feature-length film transforms her father’s famous play KASPAR from 1967 into an absurd and anarchic babylonian confusion with her mother as protagonist.

Considering the shoulders of giants we’re standing on – the foundation of any culture – it seems quite obvious for an artist to deal with questions of influences within family structures.

Amina Handke

This film was an opportunity to find a level of familiarity and exchange with Amina that is only possible in serious collaboration.

Libgart Schwarz

Hail the aged Kaspars, with their eyes and tongues of explorers!

Peter Handke

Both highly concentrated, ostentatiously wavering and highly comical at times.

Claus Philipp, EIKON

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The Academy Album is an artistic video portrait of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna highlighting its history and present in fifty-two short episodes. The episodes explore concepts of art, science, and teaching, interpreting
them in different ways by pursuing an experimental, informative, absurd and/or documentary line.

Watch the Academy Album on the Academy’s website

7′, HD, colour, sound

In Fermata might be pidgin Italian for “at the stop” or “closed in”. The camera is locked inside a room (“camera”) looking out. There are bars. The inside is invisible, it is excluded, but still enclosed – as opposed to a part of the seemingly wide and free outside. A motif of many films, since the beginning: Are passers-by looking at the camera, the room or the person behind it? Is the camera looking back or is it us? Are the people playing or being authentic – and is there a difference and where? Is a view from a room still the predecessor and inspiration of theatre and cinema, even before there was mobility, car and train rides?

19′ 46”, HD, colour, sound

I asked my mother – an actress – to reenact her mother who I barely knew. But she remembers very little.

Mother of Mother recounts of scrappy memories and brittle family relationships of three generations, marked by absences and separations. Also by the effects of a war or – more generally – the influence of ideologies and conventions on conceptions of women’s and mothers’ roles, and how these are being passed on and reflected. Daily life thus coined is so unspectactular that it is perceived as normality.

Video (DV PAL, colour, sound), 2′ 34”

A selection of emotional facebook statuses about serious matters is recited by other persons than the authors and recorded with mobile telephone or computer microphone, in a quality matching the medium. The video material is composed of allegedly sensational (instead of informative) recordings that correspond only in part to the topics on the sound track. Their selection is intentionallly determined by obscurity and unassignability.

Video (SD 4:3, colour, sound) 7´06´´

Manifestaciones is a holiday movie, a collection of manifestations of human traces in vacation resorts.

Single channel video, 7:23 min

A reconstruction starting from an audio tape from childhood on which two friends – Amina Handke and Lojang Soenario – interview each other and a photograph showing the two: Isn’t memory always a construction of the past, shaped by its remains (or those that are missing) and in the present?

Also released on  Video Edition Austria

5 Video Spots, 5×30”

An Antithesis to the official Austrian tourism commercial, inspired by the first right wing coalition government in Austria since 1945.

Loop

My first and only Smorph Porn, originally shown as loop