Der Stoff, aus dem Träume sind

What motivates people to organize their own communal living? What are the ideals behind it, how do they finance themselves and how does life in a community work? Based on six self-managed residential buildings in Austria from 40 years ago, the documentary film "Der Stoff aus dem Träume sind" sets out in search of answers. Filmmakers Lotte Schreiber and Michael Rieper tell these six stories by staying very close to the protagonists. "The pioneers of the co-operative housing project in Graz-Raaba (1975) talk about its origins in the experimental ideals of the 1960s, about internal and external conflicts and about growing old together, while the residents of the Gärtnerhof eco-settlement in Gänserndorf talk about life on the periphery between idyll and isolation. The most recent buildings, the housing project at Vienna's Nordbahnhof and the willy*fred project in Linz, show completely different models and social milieus: here sociocracy with bourgeois responsibility, there the explicitly political ambition of permanently withdrawing houses from the market as part of the rental housing syndicate developed in Germany. The architecture always remains in the background, but its role is reflected in the everyday lives of the residents, as is the political resonance space. The balance between lived solidarity and social control and the question of how transparent life should be for neighbours is a leitmotif that runs through the entire film, as is the tension between urban and village life. The editing and dramaturgy make these tensions visible and palpable, making The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of a cinematic experience that goes far beyond the purely documentary episodic." (Maik Novotny)