News, 16.02.2026

Apocalypse LOL

10 years of useless and beautiful

DIAMETRALE Filmfestival 2026, 10th Edition

Ten years of DIAMETRALE! Ten years of useless and beautiful! For a decade now, we’ve been celebrating a cinema in Innsbruck that takes itself sometimes less, sometimes more seriously – and in doing so, spares neither itself nor the world.

For the tenth anniversary, this principle becomes a maxim: Apocalypse LOL stands for riot with charm, resistance with wit, and community with a taste for risk. Films that don’t soothe but provoke. Evenings that feel like collective experiences. Conversations that open up spaces for self-empowerment.

Apocalypse LOL does not celebrate the end of the world; it’s an encouraging act of liberation. Let’s be honest: it no longer feels like the world is about to come apart – by now, it’s already flying wildly across the playing field. News cycles, political storm fronts, permanent crisis, doomscrolling, self-optimization – everything at once, all too much. That’s exactly why we need places where people meet, laugh together, discuss, argue, think, and sometimes simply endure things.

DIAMETRALE sees itself as such a place: a festival as a temporary counterworld. Failing together, fantasizing, contradicting one another – and above all, laughing out loud. Laughter is not escapism, but an effective cultural technique. It disarms authority, scratches at the seriousness of power, and creates closeness where otherwise only distance prevails.

Ten years of DIAMETRALE also means: we keep going (and keep laughing) – with humor, conviction, and a loving tendency toward exaggeration. For a cinema that has what it takes to imagine the world as freer and more defiant. Cinema as a playground, as a training camp for self-empowerment, sex(p)ositivity, dissent, and collective wonder. Useless, beautiful, and always diametral!

The dazzling 10th festival program of DIAMETRALE attracts cinephile moths like streetlights: loud and brightly colored, at times shrill, at times dark and contemplative, always daring and pushing boundaries. The films, lectures, and talks of the 10th DIAMETRALE challenge and provoke, move and excite, make you cry and laugh.

Roam through 1990s New York with the DIY punk version of Romeo & Juliet, take a micro-time trip with a Japanese café owner, and pay tribute to the great Udo Kier. Fly through the Gaylaxy with queer princess Saira, follow sex worker AP on her spiritual mission through Trashtown, and battle creative block and childhood monsters alongside grungy Mia. Explore the blind spot of perception and find out what really goes wrong when pain becomes your USP.

Once again, the short film competition is the heart of the festival. And new on board this year: the collective Me AndOther Me, enriching the festival with an extensive immersive program.

And because it was so beautiful: extra kisses to the die-hard DIAMETRALE fans – the world’s second screening of DAS GLÜCK DER LÜCKE, the completely unplanned initial spark of the festival!

In this spirit: keep celebrating the absurd with us, because “absurdity is the only possible way.” (TB)

Yours truly, the delightfully wrecked, apocalyptic snail-shell riders of

DIAMETRALE & Kulturkollektiv ContrApunkt