The Austrian Film Museum and sixpackfilm present two programs with an array of films by Gunvor Nelson. Considered Sweden's most significant female experimental filmmaker, Nelson began her path on the US's West Coast in the 1960s. Along with pursuing her own artistic work, she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for more than 20 years before returning to Sweden in 1993.

"VARIETY, EXCHANGE, CRAZY ZEAL, ENERGY, NONSTOP ENTHUSIASM, and a COMMITMENT TO EXPERIMENTATION IN ART, LIFE, AND THE SOCIAL MEDIA," reads Barbara Hammer’s formula for a radical cinema of love against the American Dream. Hammer (*1939) is one of the most important representatives of American independent cinema. Her experimental documentary works present the most extensive avant-garde body of work on lesbian love, relationships and the expressive power of sexuality.

With the films of Claudio Caldini (* 1952) and Pablo Marín (* 1982), both from Buenos Aires, the Filmmuseum presents two generations of Argentine avant-garde filmmaking, which began in the 1960s and has barely been noticed in this country. This cinema has strong references to the avant-garde traditions of the 1920s and the New American Cinema, but shows a great independence between the poles of the lyrical and the structural film.

"The goal is for the projected image to have the same force of awakening sight as any other great image."

Over five decades, American filmmaker Robert Beavers (*1949) has come closer to this self-set goal than anyone else in his métier. Those fortunate enough to have experienced the complete retrospective of Beavers' work organized by the Austrian Film Museum in the autumn of 2010 are familiar with the sensory intoxication and the intensity of visual and aural experiences these works give rise to. They offer an immersion into the beauty and intelligence of craft – both when it comes to the places and activities recorded by Beavers (anywhere between Florence and Massachusetts) and in relation to his own film craft shining in the projection.