“You’ve been a problem ever since you were born”: The Growing Pains of New Austrian Film Production through Ulrike Kofler’s Gina

Child neglect has long been a staple of European cinema. The lost boys of post-war Italian neo-realism saw the pressures of adulthood placed on them from a very young age – in Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1949), twelve-year-old Edmund’s plight ends in suicide; in De Sica’s masterpiece Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), young Bruno’s responsibility to provide for his family increases as his father struggles to find employment. In the 2020s, a new European cinema similarly concerned with childhood neglect has begun to emerge, this time centred on young women growing up with absent parents. Colm Bairéard’s Irish-language film An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl, 2021), Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel’s Un monde (Playground, 2021) and Austrian Ulrike Kofler’s Gina (2024), which recently celebrated its UK premiere at the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival, all cohere with this new movement. What’s more, they are all films from countries that are often described as small national cinemas, and about neighbouring states that share their same language, but boast a larger domestic market and film history (that is, the UK, France, and Germany respectively).  

The early 2000s saw a surge in cinephilic interest in Austrian cinema, as some great auteurs like Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl rose to international and critical acclaim. Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games – and its 2007 US remake of the same name – Caché (Hidden, 2006), and Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) were all critical favourites, while Seidl’s Import/Export (2007) was frequently screened on British television channels like FilmFour. Back in 2016, I reviewed Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver Speck’s New Austrian Film, a book that captured the spirit of this new cinematic wave, known for its “bad taste” and bracing subject matter.¹ Yet what the book established was that these filmmaking cycles have “something to do with the disruption of the very concept of nation.”² On a smaller scale, this “disruption” can also be located within the concept of family – a prism refracting wider socioeconomic and political issues affecting people across the continent. 

Austria was the “country focus” of the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival, a choice that coincided with the restoration of four previously unavailable Michael Haneke’s made-for-TV films, released in DVD from Criterion and Janus Films: Lemminge Teil 1: Arkadien (Lemmings Tale 1: Arcadia, 1979), Lemminge Teil 2: Verletzungen (Lemmings Tale 2: Injuries, 1979), Drei Wege zum See (Three Paths to the Lake, 1976), and Die Rebellion (Rebellion, 1993).³ In the 2020s, film funding bodies began to modify their strategies to incentivise film productions in the country. As with many countries in Europe, Austria has a tax support system designed to attract international co-productions and promote Austria as a film location. The FISA+ scheme requires an Austrian independent company to apply for a 30 percent grant with a bonus of 5 percent for “green filmmaking”.⁴ This mechanism was introduced in 2023 to allow Austria to be more competitive in the filmmaking sector and prevent the loss of potential film projects to neighbouring countries.⁵ This is particularly pressing when one considers the similar incentives promoted by Hungary, which extended its tax relief for international productions from 20 percent in 2008 to 30 percent in 2018, and which was recently further extended.⁶ Across European countries with smaller national cinemas than the so-called big five (UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), tax incentives for film production are increasingly competitive. Belgium’s tax shelter – implemented in 2003 – now offers tax breaks of up to 45 percent, while in Ireland these reach 32 percent.⁷ But as Hungary’s example shows, PM Viktor Orbàn’s efforts to boost international co-productions have had a negative corollary impact on the content of Hungarian national films.⁸ As for Austria, the industry has grown plenty since the incentives were implemented, both in terms of international co-productions and national productions.⁹ Regional networks and funding institutions such as the Ciné-Regio network encourage filmmakers and film companies to engage with “greener” methods at a local level. For example, Vienna Film Fund is a member of this transnational network, and it has signed up to encourage more sustainable filmmaking in the city.¹⁰ 

Reports issued by the European Audiovisual Observatory in 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2024 highlighted that women filmmakers across the major European film industries tended to only produce one feature film. And yet, as the EAO inquiries have shown, women filmmakers have been steadily on the rise in European national film industries, growing from 20 percent in 2015 to around 27 percent in 2024.¹¹ Austria, together with neighbouring Germany, is one of the few countries where the average is slightly higher – around 33 percent¹² – in part thanks to the incentives and funding opportunities made possible by the OFI (Austrian Film Institute).   

The OFI has been monitoring gender inequalities and imbalances in the national film industry since at least 2016, when it published the first of three gender incentive reports. To what extent then is the new Austrian cinema of the late 2010s and 2020s truly female-centred, and in what ways does its approach to filmmaking feel female-orientated? What sort of stories are now being told, and which characters appear more frequently on screen? 

Vienna Film Fund Managing Director Christine Dollhofer has long stressed the importance of addressing the gap between male and female directors: “[t]he target is that the current gender imbalance of 75:25 will be modified step-by-step up to the end of 2024 to achieve a female share of 50 percent.”¹³ For Dollhofer, addressing gender imbalances in the film industry serves a wider point of highlighting inequalities across other fields, and shows that the medium can “send social signals about more justice and diversity.”¹⁴ Her words date back to 2021, when Austria already enjoyed one of the highest percentage shares of women filmmakers in European cinema – around 30 percent – alongside Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.¹⁵ The resurgence of filmmaking activity in Austria has coincided with the increased support for women filmmakers and filmmakers from marginalised communities across the country. Following their reviews in the late 2010s, the OFI acknowledged that more could be done to support women filmmakers. During the period of New Austrian cinema of the late 1990s and early 2000s, as Von Dassonovsky and Speck contend, “the collaborative quality […] manifested itself as a creative network that has replaced the historical male dominance of Austrian cinema with a female direction that is unique among the ‘new’ cinemas of Europe,”¹⁶ as evinced by the filmographies of Barbara Albert, Kathrin Resetarits, Vera Mund, Jessica Hausner, Valeska Grisebach, and Ruth Mader. Like Haneke before her, Hausner evidenced the transnational dimension of filmmaking practices across the late 20th and early 21st century. Some of her most notable works were produced outside Austria, for example the French-language Lourdes (2009) and English-language Little Joe (2019). More recent examples of the prominence of Austrian female filmmakers include Graz-born Marie Kreutzer. Her 2022 period piece Corsage – which starred Luxembourgish-German actress Vicky Krieps and was distributed globally by MUBI – was an Austrian-Luxembourgish-German-French co-production, funded as a 51 percent majority Austrian film, with an expenditure in the country that amounted to 32 percent of its total budget.¹⁷ In January 2023, the third gender incentive was introduced to support emerging women filmmaking talent in Austria, as about 35 percent of films funded in the country were for female talent for the years 2020-2021.¹⁸ This marked a rise from 28 percent between 2017 and 2019.¹⁹ According to UNESCO, the monitoring period for the implementation of the gender incentive commenced in 2016,²⁰ and three Gender Report documents have so far been filed. As a result of these efforts, we are now seeing more support for women filmmakers – particularly for filmmakers working on their second and third features. In 2019, the European Audiovisual Observatory highlighted that women filmmakers rarely moved beyond a first feature film across European filmmaking countries.²¹ The question to return to is: what might these films look like?   

Gina

With Gina (2024), writer-director Ulrike Kofler brings systemic child neglect to light, and dissects it as it passes through three generations of women. A follow-up to her 2020 feature debut Was wir wollten (What We Wanted), Gina marks Kofler as one of the few female filmmakers in Austria able to move on to their sophomore film. In both features, Kofler focuses on the family. What We Wanted follows a couple facing fertility issues, while Gina turns to the pressures and difficulties of single parenthood. The film was funded through the aforementioned FISA+ scheme, alongside regional funding through the Vienna Film Fund, Austrian Film Institute, and Lower Austria. The budget was initially confirmed in 2021, with further funding granted in 2023.²² The reported total share of production costs spent in Austria constituted 26 percent of the budget.²³ This aligns with the updated and adapted funding schemes that support emerging filmmaking talent in Austria and boost local economies through film, demonstrating how those initiatives support feature productions across the country.

Kofler’s film, similarly preoccupied with some of the bracing topics of its New Austrian Cinema forebears, does not register as exploitative. In fact, Kofler’s style and approach has more in common with films from other small filmmaking countries like Belgium than its Austrian antecedents from the late ‘90s and early aughts. For instance, as scholar Alexandra Lloyd has argued, Haneke’s films seek to challenge the idea of childhood innocence and refuse to view children solely as victims.²⁴ For Haneke, Lloyd contends, “the child-in-film’s agency can […] be disruptive, challenging the viewer in a way that corresponds to the process of defamiliarisation,” which is to say his films stand in opposition to “idealised notions of the child.”²⁵ Kofler’s own depiction of childhood suggests some changes from those earlier Austrian films. In her latest, nine-year-old Gina lives with her single mother Gitte and three younger brothers in near poverty, and the degree of agency Kofler affords her titular protagonist highlights the social inequalities she must wrestle with. For Kofler, Gina shoulders the weight of responsibility for her brothers and has been asked to take on the role of a pseudo-mother, as evidenced in a scene that sees her hiding the last few pieces of takeaway pizza – bought by one of Gitte’s beaus – in her doll’s pram. Many of the stories that inspired Gina came from Kofler’s own background as a foster mother working alongside Vienna’s social services. “It’s often a matter of basic supplies not being available,” the director has said of those experiences. “There isn’t enough to eat, the children are hungry, and when there is some food, they start hoarding it, to provide for worse times to come.”²⁶ Even an ostensibly affluent society cannot guarantee the basic needs of all its children. 

Formally, Kofler explores Gina’s neglect by focussing on her point of view. It’s a choice that speaks to Karen Lury’s analysis of onscreen representations of children as agents. Alexandra Lloyd also draws on Lury to discuss Haneke’s “disruptive” filmic childhoods.²⁷ Lury highlights the importance of the act of seeing from the child’s perspective: “the essential understanding of the child here is the child as being rather than becoming […] I think that an important aspect of the child-as-agent is that the child encourages us, as the cliché has it, to see the world differently.”²⁸ Accordingly, Kofler’s camera remains at Gina’s eye level, bearing witness to the many forms of violence and deprivations she experiences. This includes Gina and her brothers’ regular consumption of junk food – as Gitte does not have time to prepare balanced meals – and the many lies the girl tells social services. Time and again, Gina claims her mother is more than fit to care for them all, all while omitting to discuss the woman’s regular drinking and smoking, to say nothing of her own struggles to care for her siblings when Gitte is out clubbing to find some cathartic release from the pressures of motherhood. The focus on the purview of a young girl experiencing a troubling childhood connects Gina with Wandel’s Playground, similarly shot at its young protagonist’s eye level. Single parenthood is shown as a very 21st century challenge; in Gina, the incessant pressure of motherhood leads Gitte to find respite in alcohol and night-long parties. Lensed by cinematographer Robert Obberrainer, the film employs Brechtian ruptures at heightened moments of emotional turmoil for the family. As Gitte argues with the father of her unborn child, the camera lingers on empty rooms, while the angry voices reverberate around the flat. There is a certain theatricality to the static long shots that capture these noises, which allows the audience to intuit the violence without needing to have it written on the children’s faces. The camera is mainly placed on Gina’s level, leaving the events to unfold from her perspective. But, in these instances, the spectators are encouraged to consider the wider implications of the breakdown of the family, and how this is not just Gina and her brothers’ story, but one that is experienced by many children. Usually, Obberrainer and Kofler keep the camera on Gina’s level, mirroring the filmmaking style of Belgian filmmakers Laura Wandel and Cannes regulars Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. More specifically, Gina recalls the titular protagonist of the siblings’ 1999 Palme d’Or-winning Rosetta. Kofler even models some scenes off that touchstone, as when, early on, the young girl and her brothers crawl under some metal fencing, not unlike Rosetta’s own escapes past similar looking railings on the edge of the trailer park where she lives. In the Dardennes’ film, the girl hides her boots in the woods to protect them from getting muddy and climbs clandestinely back to her trailer so that she can try and fish for a protein-rich meal. Gina, in turn, steals food and hides it in her pram, and this cinematic reference highlights the continued plight of individuals living on the poverty line in Central and Western Europe; a quarter of a century since the Dardennes took home their Palme, very little seems to have changed. 

Gina is suffering from issues that have affected generations of women and children before her; she is just the last in a long line of neglect. Gitte is doing her best, but the damage is long-lasting. Kofler captures this in a critical event that leaves the family broken up by social services. Gina and her brothers are all hungry, and while Gitte is seen suffering from a hangover on the sofa, the girl tries to cook some tortellini with her young brother. But while trying to strain the starchy water, she inadvertently pours some of the scalding liquid on her sibling.  “You’ve been a problem ever since you were born!”  her mother lashes out at her, a line that suggests that Gina is experiencing exactly what Gitte herself went through with her own mother Branca; childhood traumas are passed down through generations.

“I want to show how phenomena such as poverty, neglect and lack of education repeat themselves from generation to generation, [and] how difficult it is to escape solely by your own efforts”, Kofler told Austrian Films.²⁹ Gina herself is being pulled under the tide of social and political inequalities in ‘20s Vienna. According to Statistics Austria, the burden on single mothers has grown from 2021 to 2024, with single mothers increasingly stressing the pressure of rising housing costs (from 24 percent in 2021 to 42 percent in 2024), and a reduction in “life satisfaction”.³⁰ Moreover, the support offered by social services for young people in families, foster care, and institutions across Austria has been steadily on the rise from 2021 to 2023.³¹ Gina ends at a swimming pool, with a shot that encapsulates Gitte’s broken relationship with her four children, turning a place routinely associated with leisure and fun into a source of frustrations. Gina is caught between the cracks of social services; her struggle, and that of other children like her, is one of Austrian society’s most pressing issues. 

What we see then, through films like Gina, is a focus on social marginalisation couched in a style that is reminiscent of some essential European filmmakers from other small national cinemas. The implementation of funding schemes, such as the FISA tax relief system and the OFI-sponsored Gender Incentives, bring a degree of artistic freedom and creativity that align emerging Austrian voices with the “new” cinemas around Europe, which place emphasis on socioeconomic inequalities and how these are affecting children in particular. These works highlight the importance of independent films and art cinema movements to a country’s efforts to address important socioeconomic topics, so that they can become a subject of wider debates.

Endnotes