Four decades ago, the photographer, cinematographer and director Elfi Mikesch left her home town Judenburg: a small Styrian town that is different from other small towns, even though it does not look it at first sight. A town with nearly 10,000 inhabitants, a run-down industrial town by the river Mur, gradually losing its population and its life. On the one hand. However, on the other hand, Judenburg is a photographer’s town, a musician’s town, a provincial town that opens up to the world. A town that is uneasy about remembering certain things, but also a town where memory is put to sound, in a way that most definitely differs from other ways.

Judenburg Now! is a document of returning and embarking, a very personal and highly political film in which Elfi Mikesch revisits the place where she grew up and where she learnt her profession, photography. She looks around, she looks at buildings and faces, meets people, talks to them; about Judenburg, about the town’s history, about its photographers, about its musicians. The writer Reinhard P. Gruber speaks about photographs that used to hang in sitting rooms and about their value for the people in those sitting rooms. The avant-garde musicians Andrea Sodomka and Daniel Lercher speak about how they transform the town and its past into sounds. Passers-by, amateur photographers as well as amateur historians speak about what they see and experience in Judenburg and what it means to capture time and history in pictures.

Judenburg Now! is also searching for new developments in Judenburg – and, surprisingly, finding them. On the journey into her own past, Elfi Mikesch explores how the town and its citizens take a chance to make their town come alive. They have no other choice: The industry that kept the town running over a long time, is in ruins. The shopping mall on the outskirts adds to the town’s demise. Despite all this, Judenburg is looking ahead and Elfi Mikesch is watching the town in doing so, from this unique perspective of closeness and distance that is inherent only in people who are looking at their home town they have left many decades ago.

In the middle of Judenburg stands a 76-meter tall tower from the 15th century. The top of the tower accommodates a planetarium. Whoever makes it to the top, will learn how to gaze into the distance. Whoever accompanies Elfi Mikesch on her research, will learn how to take a closer look, and will find – a town.