Family Ties Across Borders: Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz 2026

Every year in late April, the Austrian city of Linz transforms itself into a celebratory hub of European cinema for exactly six days. The occasion? The Crossing Europe International Film Festival, now in its 23rd year. It’s an audience-centric festival and the third biggest in Austria after the Viennale and Diagonale. Thanks to an initiative of the MIOB Network, I was invited to its 2026 edition to take part in its Lab of Cultural, Creative and Festival Journalism. After writing two film reviews from the festival, I decided to turn my eyes towards the festival itself. The following is a collection of my observations as a first timer at Crossing Europe, with additional excerpts added from my interview with the festival directors, Sabine Gebetsroither and Katharina Riedler. 
 
Perhaps it is best to start with the poster of the festival, as it is the first thing that greets you when you arrive at Linz railway station. It’s a very simple design, the portrait of a man in front of a green background. The poster then guides you through the city, appearing at tram stations and on street banners but also in less common places, such as local shop windows. I learned that the festival holds a shop window decoration contest. As an outsider with limited knowledge, I felt like the festival had become one with the city for one week.
 
A look back in the archive reveals to me that they use this poster template every year: the portrait of someone in front of a block of colour. My interview with the directors revealed the meaning behind this. “Faces of Europe. That’s the campaign,” they told me. “They’re models or ordinary people, meant to show the diversity in Europe”. 
 
The film selection is also curated with this idea of diversity in mind. There are categories for fiction, documentary, genre and youth cinema but also a specific category for local artists. Thanks to this opportunity, filmmakers from Linz and Upper Austria, or those who have a connection to the region, get to screen their films in front of an international audience with Q&As. The one film I managed to watch from this selection, Tolga Karaaslan’s documentary Baba, What’s Your Plan?, prominently featured Linz, which gave me the chance to look at Linz from a more familiar angle. The rest of the selection puts “European values” at its heart.
 
The stand-out category for me was the YAAAS! Youth Program, a contest category curated by teens with films about youth where the winner is decided by another group of teens and its promotional teasers are also made by local art students. You could just feel the festival’s sincere effort to raise the next generation of cinephiles and the outcome is a selection that is brimming with fresh energy. I was able to catch the winning film, Caroline Deruas’ Stereo Girls, a tearjerking story about friendship with an extremely catchy soundtrack.
 
As an audience-centric festival, I was curious about the audience preferences throughout the year. Were there any surprising wishes? Which categories were audience favourites? 
 
“The audience is very much into documentaries right now”, Gebetsroither and Riedler told me. “This is a tendency we’ve observed for the last two years. So we are planning on adjusting the programming, to consider scheduling documentaries in bigger screening halls rather than the smaller ones”. 
 
I had to agree with them after my own experience with the documentary selection. I watched Tom Adjibi’s brilliant docu-fiction hybrid This Is Not a French Film in a small and tightly packed room, showing the interest Linz has for even first-time documentary filmmakers.
 
We talked about this year’s selection, thematically united under the notion of “family ties”. Gebetsroither and Riedler mentioned that biographies are still a very prevalent subject in contemporary European cinema, especially in documentaries. 
 
“It’s a tendency that is still being motivated by the pandemic. Filmmakers were forced for many years to find topics within their own surroundings,” - so it makes sense that the industry is still shaped around family. 
 
They use the adjective “playful” to describe the approach of the filmmakers this year. There were lots of experimental techniques, especially in the documentary and the local artist sections. Excluding the French and Italian co-productions, the programme also had a nice focus on German and Eastern European cinema but it was possible to find films from almost all the European countries. 
 
Most of the festival venues were inside the cultural community centre Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich (OK), or Open Culture House Upper Austria, which brings together exhibitions, art installations and arthouse cinemas. It was really cool to see an art exhibition peeking at you while you’re walking to your cinema or to be met by a video installation right after finishing a film. A square was built around the OK, with restaurants and a relaxed sitting area in the middle. I observed most of the festivalgoers spending time here between screenings, trying out the food trucks and randomly meeting other cinephiles. And every night, the rooftop of the OK transformed into a free dance floor, bringing together both film lovers and music lovers. 
 
Crossing Europe’s commitment to an international organization doesn’t just stop at bringing fine European cinema to Linz. The festival is also part of the Moving Images - Open Borders Network (MIOB), which unites seven audience-centric European film festivals. Initiated by Crossing Europe itself, the network aims to celebrate European cinema in all of its facets. 
 
“It was an unofficial alliance at first,” I was told during our interview. “Our festival director at the time, Christine Dollhofer, was meeting with our friends from the festival world and they were frustrated about the attitude within the film world towards the social crises going on, especially the people from Syria who had to flee their country and come to Europe. So Christina and her colleagues founded this network that would focus on these socio-political issues to show that these festivals are aware of things going on in Europe and that we were unhappy with the EU’s border policies. And in 2017, it turned into an official network in order to get funding from Creative Europe - MEDIA Programme.” 
 
Today, the network supports professional exchange of film festivals and also organizes workshops such as the one I participated in. As part of the Network’s commitment, Crossing Europe has implemented measures to organize a sustainable and green festival, paving the way for an environmentally responsible event organization. This commitment to giving a platform to socio-political topics is visible in this year’s selection as well. From sidebar categories focusing uniquely on displacement to working conditions around Europe, the festival uses its platform to bring marginalized voices up front. 
 
Film festivals have always been a very sacred place to me. It’s obvious that watching films at home can never replace cinemas, but I’d argue that a festival experience is even more superior to a regular outing. Something about a selection of films carefully curated with a theme in mind, coupled with the chance encounters you have while running from one screening to another, creates a euphoric environment for me. And Crossing Europe, personally, was the perfect audience-focused experience. From spending hours around the OK, not just for films but for the artistic ambience to seeing how the festival existed so organically on a local basis despite its international focus, it had this hard-to-replicate the je ne sais quoi that all audience-centric festivals should strive for.