Short Film
Angela Ying Neubauer
Prediploma at Design Investigations
The premise takes the Covid-19 pandemic as a turning point: a moment that prompts a radical reordering of priorities, placing care work and the climate at the center of political life. Certain industries are slowed or stopped, while people, communities, and landscapes are given space to recover. This period becomes known as the „decade of rest.“
The fictional TV series „Conversations on the Shift“ follows three people from different backgrounds reflecting on how life has changed. Slow-paced and quietly observed, it captures the texture of this alternative Austria through its compromises, its humor, and the details of a society trying to do things differently.
The project acts as a provocation to our current relationship with the present and future, sitting with questions of labor, value, and what it might mean to genuinely rest.
As an antithesis to the ever-accelerating, loud and dystopian future depictions making us feel powerless about shaping our world for the better, it’s illustrating one that is slow and subtle, contributing to push more positive, utopian futures into the spotlight.