Where there used to be an asteroid that fell into the North American desert around 1,000 years ago - around which the US military built a small town, a school excursion destination and a kind of youth research festival in the 1950s - there is now an alien. An earth-shattering story, really, if it wasn't just a play written by a successful young author shortly before his death. But what was he trying to tell us? That's why a stellar cast, under the direction of Wes Anderson, come up with some very weird and original ideas.

Wes Anderson
The much-vaunted authenticity in films is something you look for in vain with director Wes Anderson. What you get instead are polished dialogues from the mouths of highly reflective characters to whom decidedly original things happen, in bizarre locations with an exquisite colour palette and dry humour. Since his first short film in 1994 ("Bottle Rocket"), the filmmaker, who was born in Houston, Texas in 1969, has made nine feature films (including "Moonrise Kingdom", 2012) and two animated films (such as "The Fantastic Mr Fox", 2009), all of which bear his unmistakable signature.

Specialising in exciting episodes from Austrian art history, director Dieter Berner has now taken on the early feminist musician and patron of the arts Alma Mahler-Werfel in "Alma and Oskar" after "Egon Schiele - Death and the Maiden" (2016). The affair between her, the centre of the Viennese art and music scene, and the young expressionist Oskar Kokoschka at the beginning of the last century brings both to the edge of existence with relish. Emily Cox and Valentin Postlmayr turn this amour fou into a cinema experience right down to the last row of seats.

Emily Cox
With an English father and an Irish mother - both full-time pianists - Emily Cox, born in Vienna in 1985, was literally born into an international career. In fact, it was a leading role in the British historical series "The Last Kingdom" (2015 - 2022) that brought her international fame. In the German-speaking cinema landscape, Cox has been a firm favourite since her screen debut in Marie Kreutzer's "Die Vaterlosen" in 2011. Incidentally, when you see Emily Cox playing the piano in "Alma and Oskar", you can hear her mother.

White House satires à la "West Wing" and "House of Cards" are still very popular. In "White House Plumbers", director David Mandel, who made a name for himself as the director of Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Vice President in the series "Veep", devotes himself to a real, very famous case that has never been examined from this perspective before: Watergate. What was actually planned as a disavowal of the Democratic Party led to the resignation of Republican President Richard Nixon in 1974. Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux as a conspiratorial duo on a dirty mission add a charming touch of slapstick to the real-life satire.

Anyone can conquer and colonise territories, build cities and collect rents and customs duties, whether by board game or digitally. But what about renaturalisation, or even rewilding, i.e. the restoration of the natural state before human intervention? "Terra Nil" from the South African game developer Free Lives Games is dedicated to the topics of decolonisation, unsealing and deregulation. The aim is not only to create a natural balance between flora and fauna, but also to keep it running sustainably.