Viennale

Vienna's long-running autumn film festival screens international and Austrian premieres, documentaries, shorts and experimental work across the city's historic single-screen cinemas, anchored each year by a large-scale retrospective co-curated with the Austrian Filmmuseum and drawing a notably young, cinephile audience rather than an industry crowd.

Vienna's oldest running film festival began in 1960 as an eight-feature, ten-short program cobbled together on a shoestring budget by a handful of Austrian film journalists working through the Künstlerhaus Kino, under the unwieldy original title "International Festival of the Most Interesting Films of the Year 1959." The group, formed around journalist Sigmund Kennedy, ran the event with no subsidies and films drawn from seventeen countries.