His Oscar nomination 2002 for Copy Shop shot Virgil Widrich to fame. The twelveminute black-and-white film about a copy shop owner who reproduces himself until the whole world exists just of him won 35 international awards and was invited to over 100 festivals. Widrich's animation Fast Film received its premiere at the competition in Cannes. His tribute to Hollywood action cinema received even more awards and invitations and made Widrich one of the most internationally accepted film artists.

No wonder we are dedicating this year's tribute (after avant-gardist Mara Mattuschka last year) to Virgil Widrich – in addition it is his 40th birthday on the 16th of May, right at the beginning of the festival. Widrich, who was born in Salzburg and now resides in Vienna, was just twelve years old when he made his first Super-8 film. At the age of 17 he had already shot 5 short films and one feature film, trying out all kinds of genres from documentaries, silent and trick films to action and science-fiction films. In his first feature-length film Vom Geist der Zeit (The Spirit of Time), which had premiere at the Welser Filmtage 1985, Peter Handke, a longtime neighbour of Widrich's family in Salzburg, made a cameo appearance.

Because of his aversion against the bureaucratic educational system Widrich left 1986 the Wiener Fimakademie just after a few weeks of attendance. During the following years he founded a film distribution, organized the film festival Diagonale in Salzburg, wrote scripts and worked in the multimedia sector. Having always wanted to make films, he appropriated his skills during this period. With his film Heller als der Mond (Brighter Than the Moon) starring Christopher Buchholz and Lars Rudolph, Widrich finally reached a wider audience in 2000.

In the course of the festival VIS Vienna Independent Shorts we will present Widrich's complete short film works - including a making of which shows the effort and the technical finesse of his work. While Widrich analysed the consequenxes of a transposition of the space and time line for his 1998 film tx-transform, following Einstein's theory of relativity, he created a formal analogy to the subject matter by using 18 000 printed and copied pictures which were then refilmed on 35mm. In Fast Film the kidnapping of a woman is shown in 65 000 detail screens from 300 different films which were printed, folded, assembled to complex tableaus and finally brought to life by camera. All of these three films and also two of his older works from the early 80s Auch Farbe kann träumen (Color Can Dream) and Monster in Salzburg will be shown at VIS.