“The Aleph” is the seventh episode in the “Long Story Short” series—a project by Literaturburg Ranis that brings works of world literature to life in short animated films. Tina-Maria Feyrer and Ralf Schönfelder retell Borges’ story and open up a secret place where the entire universe suddenly reveals itself. As is so often the case in Borges’ work, this narrative also revolves around a mystical experience in which time and space merge and infinity becomes apparent.

2025 – Austria has been a member of the EU for 30 years – 30 years of prosperity and freedom! To mark this anniversary, the Austrian flag transforms into a tapestry of colorful communities and identities that cannot be defined by nationalism. At the same time, collage-like texts about the EU—reflecting multiple authorship—are quoted to unite the many voices and opinions in their diversity into one large community. Onward to Europe!

What language, what images exist for the consequences of violence? The consequences of violence on the individual, on the environment? An experiment between animated film and literary text.

The stone quarry is located on the outskirts of the village and at the foot of the mountain. It is a borderland where one can encounter both the Earth’s history, dating back millions of years, and modern industry. In the film, the quarry’s environment is explored on a Sunday. Where fossils are usually processed into gravel through a mechanical extraction process, everything lies still on this day, and a new encounter takes place: the fossil collector can now search the basalt boulders undisturbed for traces of ancient life. He, like the quarry, stands between worlds and reads in the rock of past catastrophes that mirror the current destruction of our ecosystem.

Third Impact is a speculative film created in collaboration with AI systems, centering on a quantum computer tasked with preserving life on a collapsing Earth. When a mysterious event wipes out all organic life, the machine’s purpose dissolves. What follows is an emotional, existential journey told from the machine’s perspective, as it confronts memory, loss, and the remnants of human ambition in search of meaning beyond its original design.

This poetry film explores the constant struggle people face between realizing their dreams and the harshness of reality. The film shows how people cope with loss, distraction, and the search for steady work—any kind of work—whether it aligns with their personal desires or goes against them, far removed from all dreams and childlike creative ideas. We live in a time when there is no room for dreams.

“Huldigung” is a poetry film that takes the subtitle “Bankruptcy Poem” as its formal template and thus employs trash-style production, noise-based sound, a single take, and a just-in-time, on-location aesthetic. Here, what belongs together comes together. A roared swan song to the bankrupt René Benko, accompanied by the demolition noise of one of his prestigious construction projects, the Lamarr on Mariahilfer Straße. 

im zoo“ is a poetry film that uses a multi-channel projection to present memories and perceptions in a fragmentary way. Moving between documentary footage and poetic imagery, the film explores how memories take shape.

“numbers” contains only voices from television that mention specific numbers of people, figures related to random things, time periods, stock market values, etc. The video was created by an AI video generator using the spoken phrases as input: 20 million light-years away
five weeks ago
a moment or two ago
10 square centimeters
7 times as tall as Nelson's Column
400 times
two adventurers
13 series
60 million fans worldwide
...

Das Gesicht von Hella Mandt is taken from a cycle of poems by Niall Brooks called The Sleepwalker’s Dream. This short film, based on a prose-poem from the cycle, plays in the spaces between memories and dreams. It is inspired by Portrait of a Girl by Karl Tratt, (1900-1937). The story is told by a person who, over the course of a few days in Salzburg, encounters the same face three times in three different people.

In "The Simultaneity of Breathing", Mersolis Schöne envisions experimental film production as a place of encounter where drawings and press photos by Austrian artist Lisa Est and Thomas Ballhausen's poetry come together in a shared philosophical experiment. Through the voices of Apollina Smaragd (German) and James Delaney (English), lines such as "words / that always keep us alive" lead us to the threshold of a semantic breath. The film itself takes shape as a living, poetic being that explores those fleeting moments when reality and possibility meet in the blur between breaths.

Salome, daughter of Herodes - queen, woman, victim? - decides to go against the will and faith of her father. A new interpretation of the mythic veil dance as a political act rather than a mere story of jealousy. Music-Video for Alfons Kammerlander's song "Salome" with references to the opera by Richard Strauss and Oscar Wilde's play "Salome".

Letters from the visual poem of the same name form syllables and carry the flotsam of broken words away—from the banks of the Danube, from the depths.

The text, read by Rühm himself, consists of pairs of similar words in the Viennese dialect, most of which are neologisms he coined himself. Accompanying each pair of similar words are two similar images, designed by Hubert Sielecki, which depict the words as abstract photographic paintings. 
In contrast to the brilliant sharpness of images in all media, these images are blurred. In 2025, at the age of 95, Gerhard Rühm wrote 100 poetic texts, which were published in March 2026 in the volume “Welt im Wandel” (World in Transition). One poem is dedicated to the author Hubert Sielecki, who used it to create the film “Im Noankastl.”
 

A film about mistakes, apologies, and investigations that lead nowhere
A black notebook is turned
The text is read aloud
The images are shown
The sound is heard