Lotte Schreiber

What motivates people to organize communal living themselves? What ideals are behind it, how do they finance themselves, and how does life in a community work? Based on six self-managed residential buildings in Austria from the past 40 years, the documentary film "Der Stoff, aus dem Träume sind" (The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of) sets out to find answers. Filmmakers Lotte Schreiber and Michael Rieper tell these six stories by staying very close to the protagonists.

Sabaudia in Italy, created by Mussolini’s architects as a model “new fascist city”, was supplied with extensive farm lands converted from marshes. Yet, despite its undeniably “brutal” architecture, creators including Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini subsequently found Sabaudia to be a wonderful, hospitable place – the sign of a genuine, traditional Italy, and its resistance to all modern ideologies. Lotte Schreiber constructs a multi-faceted, documentary view of Sabaudia, inspired by but going beyond Pasolini, portraying it as a paradoxical mixture of social class separation, nostalgia, and everyday whimsy. (Adrian Martin)

The static and strictly framed Super8 recordings of Stromboli, the sea, and the island, construct a sublime beauty in accordance with conventions of landscape painting. The turbulent video recordings, on the contrary, play with an apparent directness, with a subjective gaze and the physicality of the images.

Schreiber consistently transfers Don Bosco, which was designed by the city's urban planning department, into rigidly framed images and sequences of serial montage. In the interplay of these mainly static shots and relaxed pans across facades and structural details, combined with quotes from Pasolini and Fellini to Antonioni, Borgate produces a visual and acoustic showcase of failed urban utopias.

36 refers to both aesthetic traditions of abstract painting and the structural approaches of early geometric films (such as those of Walther Ruttmann and Hans Richter). At the same time, other associations arise, such as early video games and their restricted movement, which was limited to the main axes. When watching 36, an unbelievable tension and concentration develops for the viewer, caused not least by the clarity of the concept and the reduction of the means. (Gerald weber)

Handstands on the ping pong table, selfies while skating: the young people of Hasenleiten use the housing estate’s park around the clock. And it’s also good for filmmaking. Lotte Schreiber’s documentary accompanies the adolescents in their daily lives and at the same time, tells the chequered history of the housing estate in southeast Vienna.

Rather than focusing on the monuments and representational architecture of the Plaza, Tlatelolco concentrates on the neighboring residential high-rises. Built in the 1960s under the supervision of modernist Mario Pani, Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco is the largest apartment complex in Mexico City. Realized at the zenith of Mexico’s economic boom, Pani’s vision of a “vertical city” beyond class distinctions has itself been shaken up on multiple occasions. Schreiber and cameraman Johannes Hammel capture the fading of an urban architectural utopia.

‘Some memories – are stronger – than others.’ With this motto, Lotte Schreiber begins her experimental documentary short film Some Memories, in which she takes a look behind the scenes of the Historijski Muzej Bosne i Hercegovine, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, located in Sarajevo.

Lotte Schreiber undertook a journey through Greece in winter to film anonymous architectures, the frequently found concrete skeletons.

The work is based on the idea of making a video with a minimum number of parameters. A uniform white grid on a blue background structures the picture. This grid moves orthogonally to the left, right, upward and downward at four different speeds. All of the audiovisual composition´s parameters are based on the ratio of the screen´s dimensions in digital video, 720 x 576. These figures or multiples or fractions of them define the speed and length of the animation. Bernhard Lang´s soundtrack follows the same logic: The frequencies of a synthetically generated square sound were modulated on the...

The video quadro (italian for square, picture, frame) is a cinematic portrait of a monumental low-cost housing complex built in the 1960s in the port city of Trieste. Like a hilltop fortress, this imposing square complex towers over the city. The social utopias of the time were expressed in this structuralist building, resulting in a bold concrete construction that was out of scale.