Award-winning filmmaker Joerg Burger took his camera behind the scenes of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, having already taken an in-depth look at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (“Das große Museum”). This time he turned his artistic focus on the museum’s scientific research, eschewing the well-known exhibition halls embedded in their architectural and artistic settings.
Moving room by room, he worked his way through the museum’s expansive collections over a period of four years, talking to researchers and engaging in lively exchanges with nearly the entire staff. He patiently documented the great dedication the museum staff show when caring for, collecting, preserving, researching and exhibiting the over 30 million objects in the museum.
The film’s precise cinematography and meticulous editing provide the perfect platform for this microcosm of institutional research, which is rising to meet the current social challenges it faces. The film opens up the institution, as if taking the viewer on a tour: Here a recently deceased lion is being brought in for taxidermy or the posture of a dinosaur is being altered to reflect the current state of research. There, the Venus of Willendorf is being digitised, or a prehistoric grave, including cremation, is reconstructed using that of a pig. 
With great curiosity, the director documented hand movement after hand movement using tweezers, saws and scanners, taking DNA samples etc., bringing all of the daily work, responsibilities and possibilities of a research museum to light bit by bit. In so doing, the camera even turns its analytical gaze on the species homo sapiens.
“Archive of the Future” shows the museum as a world that is constantly changing. The spectacular collections of the Natural History Museum are subjected to ongoing re-examination by the museum's researchers in order to find answers to the questions and problems of the future.
 
Quote from Joerg Burger:
“I am fascinated by the very special ambience of the museum and see the film as a tribute to its passion for science and to people’s insatiable curiosity to delve ever deeper into the intricate interconnections found in nature."
 
Written & directed by Joerg Burger
Camera: Joerg Burger
Assistant director: Ines Kaizik-Kratzmüller
Producers: Johannes Holzhausen, Johannes Rosenberger, Constantin Wulff
 
The premiere will take place on Monday, 11 March 2024, at 7.30 pm at Gartenbaukino.
We invite you to the FOTOCALL at Gartenbaukino at 7 p.m. and to the premiere party in the Obere Kuppelhalle of the NHM Vienna starting at around 9.30 p.m..
We look forward to seeing you there: RSVP (only when attending): irina.kubadinow@nhm-wien.ac.at