BMWKMS' Outstanding Artist Award/ Innovative Film for Miriam Bajtala
Filmmaker and visual artist Miriam Bajtala is honoured with this year’s BMWKMS Outstanding Artist Award for Innovative Film. The accompanying statement highlights her “distinctive artistic style and formal consistency, through which she expands the possibilities of film and translates socially relevant themes into a unique aesthetic film language. Many of her films explore who is heard and seen, and how images have an impact on social inequalities. In doing so, she also brings invisible labor—such as care work, migrant labor, and artistic labor—and their structural conditions to light. Her latest film, Becoming Outline, in particular, is both impressive and moving. Bajtala combines autobiographical material with performative elements to create an extraordinary cinematic experience.”
sixpackfilm has had the pleasure to collaborate with Miriam as festival and theatrical distributor since the 2000s. We are extremely happy about this recognition—and we extend our heartfelt congratulations to all the award winners!
Photo: Natascha Unkart
„Morne Fortune“ World Premiere @ NYFF Currents and more festival news
The fall season has kicked off on the international festival circuit: We are thrilled that Mara Chavez and doris duhennois will soon be celebrating the world premiere of their film Morne Fortune at the New York Film Festival in the Currents section. Also featured in Currents are Siegfried A. Fruhauf with Flim Flam and Johann Lurf with Forever...Forever in 70mm. In North America, Flim Flam is also on the program at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, where Air Liquide by Lotte Schreiber and CONFERENCE by Björn Kämmerer will be screened as well.
The experimental film enthusiasts at 25fps in Zagreb have selected Planetenwerk by Lukas Marxt & Michael Petri and Thyla by Stefan Németh for this year’s edition, as well as Forever...Forever and Flim Flam. Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF) is presenting The God That Destroys by Jyoti Mistry. At the Film Fest in Sundsvall, Sweden, Challenges of a Solitary Mind by Astrid Rothaug and Yuragim by Varia Garib and Kirill Komar will be shown.
Film Still: Morne Fortune (c) Chavez&duhennois courtesy sixpackfilm
Peter Tscherkassky: OSCAR® Awards Jury Member and The Greatest 250 Short Films of all Time
Congratulations to our Chairman, Peter Tscherkassky!
We are delighted to share two special achievements with you: Peter has been accepted as a new member of AMPAS®—The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—the renowned institution that presents the Oscars each year. This invitation is a special international recognition of his long-standing cinematic work and his extraordinary contribution to the art of film.
And that’s not all: His film Outer Space was ranked 9th on the current list of the 250 best short films of all time. This list is an initiative of yanco and the Hamburg Short Film Festival, created in collaboration with Talking Shorts, and honors the most significant short films in film history.
Photo: Eve Heller
"BLEIFREI 95" Named Winner of the Austrian Competition at Vienna Shorts
We would like to extend our heartfelt congratulations to Emma and Tina on winning the Best Austrian Short Film award at the most recent edition of Vienna Shorts (May 26–31, 2026) !
"The film's anarchic-feminist thrust delivers a powerful political statement that simultaneously places us in a state of emancipation and fear, without losing sight of the personal traits of the main characters," the jury announced. [more]
Let's Go Oscarsand European Film Awards !
VALIE EXPORT (1940-2026)
VALIE has passed away. We mourn the loss of one of the true greats, both as an artist and as a human being. Her body of work—film, video, performance, photography, drawing and installation—can be seen as a milestone in international art history; she has entrusted all her single-channel works to sixpackfilm.
VALIE was an anchor; you could always count on her. Always open-minded, incisive, and wise, she spoke out whenever important issues of the present, art, or socio-political topics were at stake. She was always there; now she has left us behind.
VALIE impressed not only because of her radical body of work, her courage, and her uncompromising feminist stance; she also won many hearts with her kindness and humor. At every event she attended, it was palpable how much affection and appreciation the audience showed her—a special occasion every single time. We are all the more grateful that, in cooperation with Belvedere 21 and the Austrian Film Museum, we still had the opportunity to celebrate her 85th birthday with a grand celebration.
Rest in Power! VALIE has a place in our hearts. We will miss her deeply.
72th Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen: "Datna Éclat" at MuVi International Programm and Distributors' Collection Screening
Datna Éclat, the latest, brilliant audiovisual collaboration between Tina Frank and General Magic, has been honored with an invitation to the MuVi International program and will celebrate its festival world premiere there.
This year’s on-site sixpackfilm market screening brings together seven current and historical works from our distribution catalog by Eginhartz Kanter, Claudia Larcher, Marie Luise Lehner & Emil Huppenkothen, Bady Minck & Angela Summereder, Thomas Renoldner, Anna Vasof, and Antoinette Zwirchmayr. Plus Crossroad by Phil Solomon—in connection with our brand-new INDEX Edition 054.
"Bleifrei 95" wins at the 38th FILMFEST DRESDEN
We extend our warmest congratulations to Emma Hütt and Tina Muffler, as well as the entire team behind Bleifrei 95/ Unleaded 95, who were awarded the Golden Horseman Short Film - National Competition prize at Dresden Film Festival/ Germany: “Over an intoxicating night, this film takes us on a high-energy and powerful tour de force through the lives of three women. It is a raw and unfiltered story of desire, love and life itself, centred on a friendship that overcomes all," say the jurors (Husein Bastouni, Ines Baumann, Jing Haase) in their statement.
Diagonale 2026 - A flurry of awards
We are thrilled about the awards won at this year’s Diagonale by the following films represented by sixpackfilm, and we extend our heartfelt congratulations:
Grand Diagonale Prize of the Province of Styria / Best Documentary Film & Mabacher Award for Best Inclusive Film
Baba, What’s Your Plan? / Baba, Ne Yapmayı Düşünüyorsun?
Tolga Karaaslan, Austria 2026, 89 min
Grand Diagonale Prize of the Province of Styria / Best Feature Film
B for Bartleby
Angela Summereder, Austria 2025, 72 min
Diagonale Award for Best Short Documentar
Motherigine
Sophie Bösker, Austria 2026, 29 min
Thomas Pluch Script Awards: Special Jury Prize & Diagonale Editing Award for Best Artistic Editing in a Feature Film
Teresa's Body
Magdalena Chmielewska, AT 2026, 76 min
Script: Magdalena Chmielewska / Editing: Anna Garncarczyk
Congratulations to all award winners
R.I.P. Dóra Maurer (1937-2026)
We have received the very sad news that Dóra Maurer has passed away in the 89th year of her life. Dóra Maurer, who had dual Hungarian-Austrian citizenship, was one of the most influential figures in the international art world. From the late 1960s onwards, she played an active role in establishing the international network of the Hungarian New Avant-Garde. In addition to her work as an exhibition organizer, her commitment to art education was also remarkable. Her oeuvre, spanning more than six decades, is remarkably diverse in terms of media, ranging from films, photographs, prints, and painting, which were her main focus. We knew Dóra Maurer as a person of absolute integrity, very open-minded, warm-hearted, and also curious—she will be sorely missed by us and the art and cultural world.
“Dóra Maurer once said that the theme central to her work is “movement in respect to the conceptual and factual effects of displacement” (1). And indeed, her extensive oeuvre produced since the end of the 1960s consistently documents movement and displacement, specifically with regard to systematics and structurality. It is the duality emanating from a particular, predetermined system combined with the subsequent observation of unforeseen deviations and ruptures that characterizes the process Maurer realized in a multi-faceted form over the course of her artistic career: from her early graphic works to her displacements as she calls them, and culminating in the “quasi-images” that she derived from spatial painting in the 1980s and 90s. Since 1973 Maurer produced a series of films in loose succession that fit in with her investigation of structure and its inherent variability. Initially, these works were solely committed to the concept of repetition and the measurability of movement, but they increasingly became concerned with a conceptual questioning of the image, closely tied to momentary fragmentations of body, movement and space. The “systems” she utilized range from seemingly simple, everyday acts (i.e. the reading of a book), to highly abstract image sequences (i.e. the presentation of purely monochrome color fields). This broad spectrum indicates early on how Maurer’s methodical approach was for all intents and purposes quite universal, although it never explicitly spread to forms of political or social systematics. And yet there is an implicit concern – and perhaps thereby unconsciously more urgent – in regard to the possibility of “dropping out of the system,” as art historian Judit Király maintains. (2) (Christian Höller, „Displacement Effects,“ Index-Edition 046, Dóra Maurer, Thinking in Proportions)
(1) DÓRA MAURER, EXTRACT FROM LECTURE AT THE HUNGARIAN UNIVERSITY OF FINE ARTS, CONFERENCE ABOUT CONCEPTUALISM IN CENTER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES [SIC], IN: DORA MAURER - TRACES 1970–1980. EXHIBITION CATALOG BUNKIER SZTRUKI, KRAKÓW, 2011, P. 19.
(2) CF. JUDIT KIRÁLY, “MATHEMATISCHE BEZÜGE IN DER KUNST VON DÓRA MAURER”, IN: MAURER DÓRA. EXHIBITION CATALOG LUDWIG MUSEUM – MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BUDAPEST, 2008, P. 46.
sixpackfilm @ Berlinale 2026
We are thrilled to announce the premieres of brilliant new films by Siegfried A. Fruhauf, FLIM FLAM, Varia Garib & Kirill Komar, Yuragim, both being selected for Berlinale Shorts Competition and Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Nursery Rhymes. (Holy) Water as well as Johann Lurf, Forever... Forever (in glorious 70mm!) as part of Forum Expanded selection of this year's Berlinale 2026
