| Franz Grabner Award | 2025 |

On behalf of the Franz-Grabner-Board, Diagonale is pleased to announce the awarded films for the Franz Grabner Award 2025! The award was presented for the eighth time as part of Diagonale ‘25 and is endowed with € 5,000 each — donated by AAFP and ORF. The prize money is earmarked for the development of the award winner’s follow-up project.

| TV DOCUMENTARY FILM / TV-SERIES / WEB FORMAT |
| Lisa Marie Gotsche for Reclaim – Der Kampf um die Demokratie auf Tiktok |

Jury statement:
“It’s easy to get lost in the thicket of topicality and dystopian swansongs to democracy. This makes it all the more important to find experienced connoisseurs who are willing to navigate us through this thicket, accompany us down the rabbit hole of new technologies and show us the battlefields where a young generation once danced and is now learning to rush and hate. The award-winning film has found these connoisseurs and presents them to us in a wonderfully witty and fast-paced computer game aesthetic. They explain to us how it can be that young people, of all people, are finding more and more favour with far-right and right-wing populist parties election after election, what role the Tiktok platform plays in this and how few facts can compete with a good meme in algorithmically dictated populism. The film provides convincing insights into a cosmos that is also accessible to social media grouches of all ages, and it does not leave us hopeless. On the contrary. It shows what the counter-attack can look like. This battle is far from over. The battlefield just needs to be reclaimed.”

Also nominated in this category were Karl Kraus – Die Macht der Worte by Franz Gruber and Susanne Pleisnitzer as well as Verbotenes Begehren – Meilensteine queerer Geschichte by Fritz Kalteis.

| CINEMA DOCUMENTARY |
| Maria Lisa Pichler and Lukas Schöffel for Mâine Mă Duc – Tomorrow I Leave |

Jury statement:
“One of the great achievements and perhaps also tasks of art is to make the invisible and invisible in a society visible. To unflinchingly place them at the centre of attention in all their complexity, without placing them in relation to those who perceive them at most as extras in their own lives. In the award-winning film, we get to know a supposed extra who, in real life, is not given her own story. Maria, a 24-hour carer who commutes from Romania to Austria every few weeks to look after old people for 3 euros an hour. This Maria is a woman with dreams, who loves her family and her homeland and who knows exactly how she is being made a ‘nobody’ in a country whose old people are so desperately dependent on her. Who, if she could choose, would stay in Romania, and whose children by no means dream themselves into our affluent societies. For whom family cohesion, friendships and their homeland are more important. The film opens our eyes to what ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ mean and takes us on a journey to an economically poor country and into the heart of a family that grows close to our hearts, above all because the directing duo Maria Lisa Pichler, who is also responsible for the editing, and Lukas Schöffel, who directed the camera, have succeeded in creating an unobtrusive closeness. The film avoids sentimentality, it does not present us with facts and does not want to lecture. We know that Maria is one of many and that her life is not an individual fate. Johannes Schmelzer-Zieringer’s carefully and sensitively captured tone should also be emphasised here, which is partly responsible for the fact that this film conveys a special intimacy with its protagonists and allows us to immerse ourselves in their world. Not only visually, but also acoustically.”

Also nominated in this category were 24 Stunden by Harald Friedl and Favoriten by Ruth Beckermann.

The jury 2025 consists of Solmaz Khorsand (journalist & author, AT), Catherine Le Goff (ARTE, FR) and Claudia Müller (director, DE).

The award was initiated by the Grabner family, AAFP, Film Austria, ORF and the Diagonale in memory of ORF journalist Franz Grabner (1955-2015). The award recognises an ethically and morally responsible and credible approach by filmmakers to their medium. It serves to support Austrian documentary films and documentaries for cinema and television on topics from culture, society, politics or history. These should deal critically with socially relevant topics.