We invite you to see ten short films which allow an insight into the festival’s various sections. And this year we have quite a few big names at the ready - including two Cannes-winners!

hosted by bubble club, DJs: weise, raw:land, giorio
Visuals by: 4youreye
Free admission

For their 30-minute films Beirut Blend and Another Night on Earth, Austrian director Fritz Ofner and Spanish filmmaker David Muñoz drew on films by Jim Jarmusch, citing and changing them, as a kind of homage with a topical-political message.

In the first of the three programmes in the National Competition, we will swim against the current and lose the odd hair or two at the hairdresser’s. We fight against suffocation, risk a fresh start, go on a hike with a Schlager star.

Irish animation artist and VIS star guest David OReilly presents his independent work.

The five winning movies of our short film competition (initiated with Wien Energie) get premiered and the best ones are being awarded.

Breaking and crossing boundaries, the individual quest for a language for expressing one’s own feelings and thoughts – this is the focus of the five short films in this programme.

Jazzy, cheeky and boozy – welcome to VIS Vienna Independent Shorts’ first ever porn night. It took 10 years – and the waiting has certainly paid off!

DJs: Sebastian Oberst (Klub Fraktal), Fabian Moos (Klub Fraktal), EinerWeniger (antime / molten moods / lewdandloud; München), Pyjamas (Circle Music/ Estrela)
+ Special Guests

Irish animation artist and VIS star guest David OReilly presents his independent work.

We will never be alone again. A risky promise the second programme in the international fiction and documentary competition makes here.

A world upside down. A heart goes out. The perspectives are shifted and quite crazy, nothing seems as it was, and nothing was ever as it was conceived.

The quest for individual and collective happiness is the leitmotif of the five films in this programme.

The unconventional use of existing materials or objects with a strong visual attraction makes itself felt in this programme.

You think you‘ve got the best film knowledge in town? Prove it! The Quiz 3000 and VIS Vienna Independent Shorts present the Filmqvis 3000, the ideal opportunity for all smartasses to show off their useless movie knowledge and win amazing prizes.

For this year’s edition of VIS, Italian culture journalist and essayist Thomas Martinelli will take a closer look at documentary material in relation to animations and also “re-enactments”.

Fantasy creatures made of plugs that have come alive, desolate industrial sites in Iceland’s vast wilderness dying a slow death; these contrary images kick off the second Animation Avantgarde programme.

Between threat and boredom, austerity and overcoming, the second programme in the National Competition takes a break from the crisis with six short films – even if there seems to be no getting away from the crisis.

"Found Animation is a playlist of bizarre, brutal and beautifully weird animations that should never be seen at a film festival." - David OReilly

No more boring films – the title says it all. Here material is reconstructed, recycled and decontextualised. One tries to recapture what was lost, raise the dead, make parting pictures dance.

A selection of the admissions that made it into the first league of trash: culinary (cooking and copulating) and cultural, educational and meaningless, vodka and vandalism, Frank Stronach and Marko Arnautovic – something for everyone!

DJs: Agathe Bauer, EcleKtric, Da Ildar Da
Free admission

VIS All-Stars + Da Ildar Da + Special Guests
Free admission

The ten films in this programme feel unreal, dreamlike, strange, trying to get to the bottom of the contradictions of unreality and reality, the depths of the subconscious.

Perhaps it is a paradox of the digital age: we share and share, yet still we always feel alone.

The festival’s glittering culmination, the awards ceremony, will take place at the Künstlerhaus Kino where we will honour this year’s prize-winners. Following the awards ceremony, there will be a screening of selected award winning films.