Europe in the cinema – For more than a decade now, the film festival “Crossing Europe” in the Austrian city of Linz stands for eccentric, sophisticated, young cinema from all over Europe.
3sat Kulturzeit / Tiziana Arico
The distance close up – The Crossing-Europe-Festival in Linz has become one of the most important platforms for young European cinema. This year the festival showed fascinating insights into a continent, in which migration has meanwhile become the norm.
epd film / Barbara Schweizerhof
Crossing Europe in the Upper Austrian city of Linz is regularly an event where Europe appears young, strong, active and right at the heart of the times, which is otherwise often not the case. Now in the eleventh year, Festival Director Christine Dollhofer has compiled a film selection again that is moving and provides impulses for thinking and acting.
Film&TV-Kameramann / Philipp von Lucke
At Austria’s most socio-politically engaged international film festival CROSSING EUROPE the strong presence of women’s films and women authors has been taken for granted from the beginning, i.e. since 2004, without any quotas or compulsions. Opportunities for the audience to encounter female perspectives both in the competition and in the parallel sections were many, which of course meant female protagonists and women’s issues, but far more: striking, unconventional personal voices and oeuvres evolving in unusual ways.
Filmvilag / Zsófia Buglya
The woman in the neighboring seat pulls the neck of her sweater up over her eyes, my own body tenses up. At the Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz a feeling of oppression emerges on the screen, and a sense of apprehension becomes the collective state of the audience for a few moments. This is how unfathomable, how sad, how incredibly “in your face” contemporary European cinema can be.
fm4.orf.at / Maria Motter
With an interval of half a year between it and the Viennale, this festival has long since become the second loud voice in the Austrian film landscape, with a festival director who holds the attention of both the local and the international audience. From the start, she found thematic focal points that have proven their worth. [...] And something else is remarkable: that which festivals everywhere dramatically proclaim impossible, namely finding high quality work by women filmmakers, is not an issue in Linz.
Die Furche / Magdalena Miedl
Instead of spectacle, the Crossing Europe Film Festival continues to rely on small films that are close to the people and often also seek their own filmic language for their stories.
kultur-online.net / Walter Gasperi
The film festival that takes place every year in Linz has meanwhile more than 20,000 visitors. And it is to be hoped that the seed will grow that is sowed by the filmmakers from all over Europe, who have something to say apart from the mainstream. Their efforts should become a multiplier that reaches many hearts and minds via Linz.
Neues Volksblatt / Philipp Wagenhofer
Whether you attend the opening or the awards gala of the “Crossing Europe” Film Festival in Linz, one thing is certain: there are happy faces everywhere you look. The only difference is that, like yesterday at the awards presentation, happy anticipation has given way to radiating triumph. The winning films of the 11th festival deal in manifold ways with social characteristics and conflicts.
Oberösterreichische Nachrichten / Nora Bruckmüller
The achievement of the Crossing Europe Film Festival actually consists of bringing fresh, raw filmmaking to Linz, with a high proportion of it marked by women filmmakers. And conversely of arousing enthusiasm for this kind of cinema among a new, young audience. A music video program newly introduced this year was just as conducive to bringing pupils and students into the cinemas as the “Local Artists” track with works by Upper Austrian directors or the “Night Sight” midnight track with European genre films.
orf.at / Maya McKechneay
In the year following its tenth anniversary, the Linz film festival “Crossing Europe” is still committed to freshness: this year’s selection again enables discovering young talents without dispensing with bigger names with appropriate quality.
Die Presse / Christoph Huber
In the meantime, we know what we have with “Crossing Europe”: a politically aware and aesthetically sophisticated annual show of the covertly blossoming cinematic treasures that the continent of Europe is capable of producing.
Profil / Stefan Grissemann
Between art film and horror-comedy – Crossing Europe turns Linz into the hot spot of European film.
Raiffeisenzeitung / Eva Pakisch
Films like the prize-winning film “Family Tour”, which was funded with barely 30,000 Euros, are among the strengths of the Linz festival, curated by Christine Dollhofer with a sure hand. What was convincing about many of the films this year was the precise view of milieus, not only in their proletarian, but also bourgeois variations.
Der Standard / Dominik Kamalzadeh
Over the years Christine Dollhofer has established an intelligently programmed film show centering around the idea of Europe, because films from every part of the continent are screened.
Wiener Zeitung / Matthias Greuling
