19/10/2026 - Five cinemas, 261 films and a strong sense of political urgency: this year’s gathering takes stock of itself and of the world beyond the screen

Running from 22 October-3 November, the 64th Viennale will show 261 films from 71 countries at 330 public screenings across five cinemas and six auditoriums. The shortest film will run at three minutes, and the longest at seven hours and ten minutes. Watched back to back, they would unspool for longer than the length of the festival itself. The idea, according to festival director Eva Sangiorgi, is to answer a question the team has been hearing more and more often: “What function does a festival have?”

Part of the answer lies in the movies themselves, many of which deal with conflict, displacement and resistance. In Halayon, Avi Mograbi returns to footage of Saffuriyya, the village his friend Ali Al Azhari was driven away from in 1948. Kamal Aljafari’s Going Home sees images of Gaza displayed on his parents’ television. Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller’s They’re Here follows Minneapolis residents organising protests against ICE raids in the freezing winter. Mohammad Rasoulof, in exile since 2024, imagines an Iranian writer weighing up whether to return home and face prison in Sense of Water. Bani Khoshnoudi’s Elegy for the Forgotten, on an Endless War gathers images of violence in Iran, from the war with Iraq to this year’s bombings. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s South of Tehran, made with Jafar Panahi, screens ahead of Mani Haghighi’s I Deserve a Lover.

It is also a strong year for Austrian cinema. The Viennale will open with Johann Lurf’s Forever…Forever, which compresses 22 months at the Ottenstein reservoir into 21 minutes and will be projected on 70 mm. The closing film will be The Loneliest Man in Town by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. The duo is also the subject of the ninth volume of the Viennale’s book series, Textur. “They stand for a cinema we believe in,” Sangiorgi elaborates. Several other Austrian filmmakers are showcasing their successful festival work as well: Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, Katharina Rabl’s Memories of a Forest, Andrina Mračnikar’s Mila/Marija, Sebastian Brameshuber’s London and Manuel Wetscher’s Eklipse.

In the international section, some big names are eagerly expected, amongst them Albert Serra (Sixteen Moments of My Life), Angela Schanelec (My Wife Cries), Bruno Dumont (Red Rocks), Denis Côté (Nobody’s Violence), Mariano Llinás (Life of Jorge Luis Borges) and James Benning (Eight Bridges). Ulrike Ottinger will show The Blood Countess, starring Isabelle Huppert and Birgit Minichmayr. Volker Schlöndorff presents his Visitation and looks back on six decades of directing during a talk open to the general public. Nina Hoss (acting in The Other Side), Ira Sachs (The Man I Love) and Radu Jude (The Diary of a Chambermaid) have also been announced as partaking. In the section showcasing the crème de la crème from the A-list festivals, the programme also includes Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes winner Fjord and Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine.

This year’s trailer comes courtesy of Kelly Reichardt, who used scenes that didn’t make it into The Mastermind. Female directors only account for 33% of the programme this year: the festival itself calls this “a still insufficient figure”, even though the balance is better than it has been at the major festivals.

The monographs are devoted to US experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon and to Vasko Pregelj, whose movies from Yugoslavia’s amateur film clubs were thought lost for 25 years. The “kinematographies” focus on war reporter and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, and on Abbas Kiarostami’s early shorts for children. Organised together with Filmarchiv Austria, the “Alles bunt und wunderbar?” strand revisits Austrian cinema of the 1990s. The main retrospective, co-presented with the Filmmuseum, covers Robert Aldrich’s work.

An attempt to lock in the next generation of cinephiles, the new Debut Card allows 14- to 19-year-olds to see 19 selected films for €8.50 each. The new festival centre at the Funkhaus Wien hosts concerts, parties and talks, all with free admission.