07/07/2025 - The second round of 2025 funding sees €3.7 million go to 30 projects, including bold new works by acclaimed auteurs and rising talents, as well as socially engaged documentaries and TV series

Directors Jessica Hausner and Ulrich Seidl (© Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it)

The Vienna Film Fund has revealed the recipients of its second round of funding for 2025, distributing a total of €3.7 million to new film and television projects. Nine fiction features and nine development projects shared more than €3 million, while 12 TV productions received €668,000. The call attracted significant interest, with 46 film submissions requesting €9.7 million and 18 TV proposals seeking €877,000.

Production support was granted to Toxic, the latest feature by Jessica Hausner (Club Zero [+see also:
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interview: Jessica Hausner
film profile], Little Joe [+see also:
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interview: Jessica Hausner
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film profile]), which was recently presented at the Marché du Film’s Investors Circle in Cannes (see the news). Structured into four chapters, Toxic presents modern parables that explore the contradictions and emotional tolls of modern working life within a capitalist system. At times realistic, at others absurd, the film highlights the human element as a disruptive force within a profit-driven world. Co-written by Hausner and Jessica Lind, the movie is a co-production between Vienna’s Schubert Film, Berlin’s Essential Filmproduktion and Société Parisienne de Production in France.

Also supported is Distanzen, the new project by internationally acclaimed filmmaker Ulrich Seidl (Rimini [+see also:
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interview: Ulrich Seidl
film profile], In the Basement [+see also:
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film profile]), produced through his own Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion. Co-written with longtime collaborators Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, the film centres on Carl, a man who organises “dark tourism” trips to sites of suffering and death. At home, his fragile domestic life is thrown into turmoil by his reclusive son’s emotional outburst, threatening their precarious connection. The film examines the paradox of longing for human closeness while simultaneously fearing it. A co-production between Austria, Germany and France, Distanzen will be shot across multiple countries, including Austria, Belgium, France, Latvia, South Africa and Poland, with completion scheduled for 2027.

Emerging talents are also represented among the funded fiction films. Jasmin Baumgartner’s debut feature, Sentimental Fail Club, produced by KGP Filmproduktion, follows teenage sisters who stage a theatre play based on their parents’ diaries in a bid to go viral and escape their uneventful village life. In Heart Beats by Johanna Lietha (Lovecut [+see also:
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film profile]), an 11-year-old girl moves to Vienna with her father and his new partner. Struggling with grief and alienation, she gradually finds healing through playing the drums. The film is being co-produced by Vienna’s berg hammer film and Zürich’s Tellfilm.

Documentaries make up a substantial part of this round, tackling themes of identity, social inclusion and historical reflection. In Was fehlt, das bleibt, directors Katharina Brunner and Lukas Ladner follow four young adults with physical disabilities as they navigate intimacy and connection. In Darkness in the Box, Matthias Writze delves into the limitations and hallucinations of artificial intelligence, interpreted through the figure of a demonic entity known as the Crungus. Marko Doringer’s Der Soldat is an essayistic inquiry into his grandfather’s entanglement with the atrocities of the 20th century, whereas Margarita Jimeno’s Florentina profiles radical choreographer Florentina Holzinger. Alexandra Schneider’s Sowieso und überhaupt – Die Welt der Christine Nöstlinger, produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion, pays tribute to one of the German-speaking world’s most beloved children’s authors.

On the development front, nine projects received a total of €192,000. Among them is Empire of Sentiment, a historical drama by Sebastian Meise (Great Freedom [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sebastian Meise
film profile]), co-written by Thomas Reider, chronicling an African slave’s journey to repatriate the body of famous explorer David Livingstone to London. The project is being co-produced by Vienna-based FreibeuterFilm and London-based House Productions.