Looking back on Club 2x11 - SCREENSHOT

The football film genre had a bad reputation among cineastes and filmmakers. It took decades for football to arrive in film - mainly in documentaries, but also in arthouse films and finally in the mainstream. “The festival city of Vienna is now getting what it has long deserved.” With these words, moderator Michael Schmied introduced the discussion and presented the upcoming open-air football film festival.

Nobody knows more about the variety of great football films than our panel guest Jan Tilman Schwab, who has published the football film encyclopedia with around 500 films on over 1,000 pages. As an expert on football films, Tilman also knows how the genre has developed, and which memorable films have changed the industry. SCREENSHOT co-initiator Andreas Kous also emphasized the series of international football film festivals that have already become firmly established in many cities and thus enrich the festival landscape. A vision to which the SCREENSHOT organizers have also committed themselves for the (festival) city of Vienna.

Given the large number of strong football films, curating a four-day festival is no easy task and can sometimes be too much of a challenge. Every year, dozens of short football films are submitted to Vienna Shorts, which often do not make it into the program, but are nevertheless of high artistic quality and offer exciting perspectives on football. This circumstance also made the programmatic cooperation between SCREENSHOT and Vienna Shorts possible. All the panel guests, but above all the director (of “Diamante - Football God”) and producer Karin Berghammer, know all about the challenges of shooting a football film. After all, the artistic aspirations have to match the footballing images that already exist in the mind. This requires not only the experience of the film team, but also the precision and football skills of the protagonists. A combination that causes some films to fail from time to time.

The films shown in the 1st SCREENSHOT edition have definitely not failed. This opinion intensified the longer the discussion went on and the panel guests looked forward to the premiere. The hope of the audience and the panel guests that SCREENSHOT will become a lasting institution in the Austrian film and festival landscape echoed through the modern premises of the Büchereien Wien in Brünner Straße long after the panel discussion had ended.

Club 2x11 is an event organized by Büchereien Wien, fairplay Initiative, ballesterer and Wir Frauen im Sport.