In the trailer for the Vienna Shorts – Online Edition, the artists' collective Total Refusal (Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf) takes up the situation of the pandemic-induced turning away from public and turning to virtual space. In Spring Break, digital grasses and flowers proliferate, while blooming meadows were inaccessible in closed-off parks in Spring 2020, so the Austrian collective.

"Spring 2020 will be remembered as the first truly digital spring," says the text of the trailer. "Because when parties and protests were dissolved by the police and film festivals became online festivals, we fled into digital space. For the first time, this space was not wicked and shady, but welcomed us as a space of security and cleanliness in a new normality.

In the lush and juicy grassland of the trailer, not only the grains and stalks thrive and grow, but also the tulips—"that elaborate, exotic flower that requires a lot of care and attention and which triggered the first speculative crisis in history". The fact that it is already burning behind the tulip field leads the supposed safety and cleanliness of the digital spring ad absurdum and gives the one-minute film a dystopian touch.

Spring Break was shot in the computer game "Tom Clancy's The Division 2" (Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft, 2019), set to music by Adina Camhy and edited by Robin Klengel. Total Refusal are also featured in the competition with their film How To Disappear, and Klengel and Müllner are making a guest appearance in our online edition with the live performance of their previous film Operation Jane Walk.

News 21.5.2020