Arthouse Cinema

With the mdw’s Future Art Lab and Its Arthouse Cinema, a long-held dream of Film Academy Vienna has come true: the new spaces on the mdw’s main campus at Anton-von-Webern-Platz include lavishly appointed presentation, event, and production facilities for the Department of Film and Television. The Arthouse Cinema, which is intended for screenings of student productions and for coursework, is conceived as a multifunctional room with a maximum seating capacity of 77 that can also serve as an auditorium for lectures in front of large audiences and as a teaching studio for the completion of films with respect to sound mixing and colour correction/grading. A 7.5-metre-wide screen in Cinemascope format (1:2.39), screen height in excess of three metres, and Digital Cinema-standard 4K laser projection do justice to the highest technical requirements of digital productions—and the employed technology allows the cinema to operate at a professional level not only for public events but also for film screenings held as part of teaching. The Arthouse Cinema is equipped with Dolby Atmos, the most modern cinema audio system. Altogether 45 loudspeakers are installed, and in combination with the Dolby Atmos sound processor, they guarantee perfect and precise sound everywhere in the space. Planning of the entire audio system was done in very close collaboration with Dolby Labs in order to optimise the room acoustics and technical equipment in the best possible way and thus ensure certification. For use as a teaching studio and/or for the completion of films, the Arthouse Cinema has one integrated workstation each for colour correction/colour grading and for sound mixing that can be used by students of Film Academy Vienna and the Department of Composition, Electroacoustics and Tonmeister Education for the completion of film productions on which they’re working. And the fibre-optic network of the Future Art Lab connects the cinema’s IT infrastructure directly with the colour grading workstations and the two departments’ instructional sound studios, making it easy to switch workstations at any time depending on one’s needs and progress. While renting a cinema used to be the sole option for reviewing and assessing creative and technical screenings of the films produced at the Film Academy before their public release or submission to festivals, the Arthouse Cinema will now serve this purpose, as well. And finally, it also represents a suitable location and atmosphere for students’ team premieres and smaller Film Academy events such as retrospectives, competition presentations, and master classes given by international figures. For Film Academy Vienna, the Arthouse Cinema is more than a presentation venue: thanks to its technical facilities and myriad possibilities, it’s also poised to become a place of encounter around all things film at the mdw.