Flora
Jessica Hausner, Austria, 1996, 35mm, 25m
German with English subtitles
Hausner won the “Lion of Tomorrow” prize at the 1996 Locarno Film Festival for this coming-of-age tale, which packs plenty of tender and funny moments, pop songs, and quotidian observations into 25 touching minutes.

Inter-View
Jessica Hausner, Austria, 1999, 35mm, 45m
German with English subtitles
In this mid-length film (Hausner’s graduation film at the Filmacademy Vienna), the story of a student who conducts interviews with strangers on the street is intercut with that of a young woman who sets about changing her life while contemplating the seeming impossibility of enduring happiness.

Jessica Hausner on Flora and Inter-View:

With Flora, I learned mostly that nothing is embarrassing as long as you really mean it. Flora is a film that somehow personal but also not at all because again the style of the film is transforming the individual side of the story to a story that is very general, that’s good for everyone. So I think with Flora and Inter-View, I was very much learning that the style of my films is what creates the content—that if I found the rhythm, the visuals, the faces, the dialogue, everything can be very artificial, but it’s still moving if the story comes from the bottom of my heart. And I think before that, when I was studying in film school, I was sort of searching. Flora and Inter-View were the first two films where I sort of understood what my style of storytelling could be like, that it’s very much about cinematic language and about showing and not showing and about questioning the perception of the audience.

Read our full interview with the director here.