Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm

For the very first time, Mousonturm is acting as main venue for the international Reflecta Film Festival. This year’s programme features outstanding documentary films about people and projects in our society that are searching with subversive curiosity for alternative ways of living. How do we want to live? What does it mean to act responsibly: economically viable, ecologically sustainable and socially fair? The fringe programme includes discussions between artists, experts, activists and guests as well as interactive exhibitions, guided city tours, workshops, readings, performances and concerts. The Lokal im Mousonturm is providing food and drink with organic, regional, fair and vegetarian-vegan dishes and beverages.

The festival’s main feature films focus on current socio-political subjects such as the financial crisis, the limits of economic growth, strategies of sustainable consumerism, urban gardening, as well as thoughts on a fairer and more social organisation of the modern workplace. While global acceleration seems to have us all firmly in its grasp, more and more people all over the world are fleeing from an unbridled state of permanent stress: Philippe Borrel’s Schluss mit schnell (FR 2014, 85 min.) is an ode to a self-determined way of living. Werner Herzog and his cameraman Peter Zeitlinger set out in search of people, who have consciously decided on living and working in extreme situations.  In their Oscar-nominated film Encounters at the End of the World (US 2007, 99 min., OV with subtitles), they fight their way through Antarctica. One of Germany’s former leading investment bankers tells all in Marc Bauder’s film Master of the Universe (DE 2013, 88 min., OV), which is nominated for the German Film Prize 2014. The film reveals the dark and unscrupulous sides of the glamorous financial world as well as providing a breathtaking psychogram of the entire industry and its big players. No less thrilling is Carmen Losmann’s Work Hard Play Hard (DE 2011, 90 min., OV) in which she dogs a self-optimised high-tech workforce, while they passionately transform their work into a highly mobile life. Everyone wants more time, but although we all constantly work on saving time, in the end we still have less and less of it. In Speed – In Search of Lost Time (DE 2012, 97 min., OV), Florian Opitz questions what drives this need for speed: electronic means of communication or merely our miserable time management?

On 6 December, the Reflecta Artivist Award honours short films that move us to incite change. The award aims to encourage the commitment of artists towards making the world a more environmentally friendly and fairer place to live in.

For tickets and more information, visit www.reflecta.org