About ray Filmmagazin

ray Filmmagazin

ray Filmmagazin is an Austrian film magazine based in Vienna, published in German since 2001. Written in its own styling as ray, the magazine reports on cinema, film culture and audiovisual media: it reviews current theatrical releases, covers DVD and Blu-ray publications, reports from film festivals, interviews filmmakers and publishes essays on developments in film and in the cinema business. It appears ten times a year, including two double issues, which makes it a quasi-monthly presence on Austrian newsstands and in subscribers' letterboxes. Its ISSN is 1993-811X and its website is ray-magazin.at. In the small landscape of Austrian film periodicals — where the long-running commercial cinema magazine SKIP dates from 1983 and Celluloid from 2000 — ray, founded in 2001, established itself as the cinephile title: the magazine for readers who follow festivals, directors and film culture as seriously as they follow new releases.

ray's history is a compact story of survival. It was launched in April 2001 by a founding team led by editor-in-chief Andreas Ungerböck, lost its publishing house to bankruptcy in 2005, and was rescued by Ungerböck and his colleagues, who bought the magazine out of the bankruptcy estate and continued it at the Vienna publisher substance media. It later passed to ray Medien GmbH, its current media owner, while distribution in Germany is handled by the Schüren Verlag, the Marburg-based specialist film-book publisher — a partnership that underlines ray's position between journalism and film scholarship. Beyond its regular issues, ray is woven into Austria's festival culture through special publications and media partnerships with Crossing Europe, the Diagonale, the Viennale and other events. This profile is based on verified published sources; where the record is thin — no audited circulation figures for ray are publicly established, for instance — that is stated openly.

Founding in 2001

The first issue of ray appeared in April 2001. The founding editorial team consisted of Andreas Ungerböck as editor-in-chief, together with Bernhard Seiter and Maya McKechneay. The launch did not go unnoticed in Austrian media: FM4, the ORF's youth-oriented radio station and a natural chronicler of new film culture, marked the arrival of the new magazine on 3 April 2001 with an item headlined "There's a new man in town: RAY" — a welcome that already positioned the title as a fresh, younger voice in Austrian film writing, distinct from both newspaper film pages and the more commercially oriented cinema magazines.

The timing of the launch is part of its meaning. Around the turn of the millennium, Austrian cinema was entering the period of international festival success — the era of directors such as Barbara Albert, whose production company coop99 later became the subject of a ray special publication, and of the rigorous, internationally debated filmmaking that would make Austria a byword for distinctive European cinema. A new, serious film magazine founded in Vienna in 2001 gave that emerging film culture a domestic journalistic home: a place where Austrian films were not a side note to Hollywood coverage but a central subject, covered by writers embedded in the same scene.

Bankruptcy and the 2005 Rescue

Four years after its founding, ray faced the crisis that ends most small magazines. In September 2005 its publishing house, the Viennese PVS Verlag (also cited as PVS Verleger), went bankrupt. The title's survival was not guaranteed; magazines owned by insolvent publishers are usually simply discontinued. Instead, former editor-in-chief Andreas Ungerböck and other members of the staff acquired ray from the bankruptcy estate and continued publishing it themselves. From 2005 the magazine appeared at the Vienna publisher substance media (substance media ltd.), in effect a transfer of the title from a conventional publishing house to the people who actually made it.

That rescue shaped ray's subsequent identity. A magazine owned by its makers has a different resilience from a corporate title: it can persist on modest economics because its owners are its editors. In a 2008 press release issued through APA-OTS, Austria's press agency service, Andreas Ungerböck and Mitko Javritchev were named as the publishers of ray Filmmagazin, showing the post-rescue leadership in place three years on. The current media owner is ray Medien GmbH in Vienna. Ungerböck's personal continuity with the title is long: references in Austrian Film Institute contexts still cite an article by Andreas Ungerböck published in ray in 2026, a quarter of a century after he led the founding team — a span of editorial continuity that is rare in magazine publishing.

Publisher, Distribution and Frequency

Today ray is owned by ray Medien GmbH, based in Vienna, and continues to be produced in the Austrian capital. Its distribution reaches beyond Austria: in Germany, distribution is handled by the Schüren Verlag. Schüren, based in Marburg, is one of the German-speaking world's principal publishers of film books and film studies, and its role as ray's German distributor places the magazine in bookshops and subscription channels alongside scholarly film literature — a fitting channel for a magazine whose contents regularly include essays and film-historical material as well as journalism.

ray appears ten times a year, with two of those issues published as double issues. Austrian magazine listings therefore describe it as "monthly", and it is shelved in the monthly sections of the Austrian magazine lists — indeed, the German Wikipedia list of Austrian magazines records it simply as "Ray" in the monthly nationwide section — but the precise rhythm is ten issues annually, a common pattern for independent cultural magazines that combine summer or winter months into double numbers. The magazine is in German throughout; despite its English-looking one-word title, ray is a German-language publication for the Austrian and wider German-language film public.

What ray Publishes

The core of ray is the coverage of films themselves. Each issue carries reviews of current cinema releases — Filmkritiken that address the films opening in Austrian cinemas — together with articles on DVD and Blu-ray publications, a section of the magazine that reflects its founding era, when the afterlife of a film on disc was a central part of film culture, and that continues as home-cinema publishing. Around the reviews sit festival reports, interviews with directors, actors and other film people, and longer texts on developments in film and cinema: the magazine's self-description, as recorded in reference works, is coverage of "cinema, film culture and audiovisual media", and the breadth of that formula is real — industry and aesthetic questions are treated alongside individual films.

The magazine's online archive shows the range in practice. Its writers report from international festivals such as Karlovy Vary and from Austrian events such as the International Film Festival Innsbruck; they publish interviews with Austrian filmmakers of the standing of Sabine Hiebler and Gerhard Ertl; they write annual surveys of the film year and essays on subjects from Austrian film history to contemporary world cinema. Long-form pieces in the archive — multi-part festival diaries, retrospective essays, conversations with cinematographers and producers — give ray the character of a film journal as much as a consumer guide: the reviews tell readers what is starting, but the essays and interviews are written to be read well after a film has left the cinemas.

Special Publications and Festival Work

In addition to its regular issues, ray produces special issues and programme publications in cooperation with Austrian film festivals and institutions. Reference sources record such publications for Crossing Europe, the European film festival in Linz; for the Diagonale, the festival of Austrian film in Graz; for the Viennale; and for the International Children's Film Festival Vienna. In 2017 ray produced a festival newspaper for Crossing Europe. The same year, ray and the Film Academy Vienna jointly published a special issue marking the academy's 65th anniversary — an institutional collaboration that shows how far the magazine's role extends beyond commentary into being a publishing partner of Austrian film culture itself. Earlier, ray had also produced a special publication marking ten years of coop99, the production company founded by Barbara Albert and her colleagues, built around extensive interviews with the company's filmmakers.

The Viennale relationship is the most visible of these partnerships. ray acts as a media partner of the Viennale, Vienna's international film festival, and the festival lists it among its media partners for special publications and formats. For the 2025 festival, the Viennale noted that the October issue of ray carried a Viennale focus and that ray's authors reported from the festival online, publishing impressions and reviews as the festival ran. This dual pattern — a considered print focus before and during the festival, plus live online reporting — is characteristic of how ray now works across print and digital.

The ray Audience Award

ray's name has also been attached to prizes. At Crossing Europe in Linz, the ray Publikumspreis, the ray Audience Award, endowed with 5,000 euros and powered by ray Filmmagazin, was awarded from 2006 to 2010. Its winners map a distinctive taste in European auteur cinema: in 2006 Sergej Stanojkovski won for Kontakt; in 2007 Gérald Hustache-Mathieu for Avril; in 2008 Stefan Arsenijević for Love and Other Crimes; in 2009 Alexis Dos Santos for Unmade Beds; and in 2010 Séverine Cornamusaz for Cœur Animal. An audience award is a telling instrument for a film magazine: it converts readership into participation, and it tied ray's brand to the festival's public rather than to a jury room.

ray has also been a name-giver or partner for audience prizes at other Austrian festivals; the festival archive of Vienna Shorts, the international short film festival, records audience awards in its 2013 competition sections — Fiction and Documentary, Animation Avantgarde and the Austrian competition — in the context of the festival's prize structure of those years. Together with the special publications, these prize partnerships complete the picture of a magazine that does not merely report on Austria's festival circuit from outside but is one of its working institutions.

Editorial Character

ray's editorial character can be defined by its position between three poles. It is, first, a review magazine that performs the classic service of film journalism — telling readers what is opening and what it is worth. It is, second, a film-culture journal, publishing essays, film-historical texts and substantial interviews of the kind more often associated with film studies; its German distribution by an academic film publisher mirrors that identity. And it is, third, a magazine of the Austrian film scene, written from inside Vienna's film world, with the access that produces festival newspapers, academy anniversary issues and production-company specials.

The tone that emerges from its published archive is knowledgeable and committed rather than consumerist: long texts, bylined critics, attention to cinematography, production contexts and film history. A representative example preserved in the magazine's archive is its coverage of Ernst Schmidt Jr. and the history of Vienna film, or its extensive interview material with the coop99 filmmakers, where directors and their cinematographer discuss the visual signature of a whole movement of Austrian cinema. Where a commercial cinema magazine competes on speed and star coverage, ray competes on depth and continuity — it is still publishing considered festival reports and film-year surveys a quarter-century after its founding.

Readers and Reach

ray addresses the engaged cinema public: festival-goers, film students and academics, people working in the Austrian film industry, and cinephile readers in Austria and, through the Schüren distribution, in Germany. Its special publications put it physically into the hands of festival audiences at the Viennale, the Diagonale and Crossing Europe, and its media partnerships make its brand visible in the programmes and venues of those events. The magazine's natural competitors and neighbours are the other Austrian film titles — the monthly SKIP, which has covered cinema commercially since 1983, and Celluloid, founded in 2000 — among which ray holds the film-cultural, festival-oriented position.

On reach, honesty requires a caveat: no current, independently audited circulation figure for ray could be verified from public sources for this profile, and the magazine does not appear in the standard Austrian circulation reporting with a figure that can responsibly be quoted. This is typical of small independent cultural magazines, whose significance is measured less in copies than in presence — in festival partnerships, institutional collaborations and the citation of its writers in film-historical literature. Readers researching ray should therefore treat any unsourced circulation number for the title with suspicion; none is given here.

ray Online

The magazine's website, ray-magazin.at, functions both as the current issue's shop window and as a deep archive of the magazine's writing. Festival reports, reviews, interviews and essays are published online, including coverage written live during festivals — as with the Viennale, where ray's authors post their experiences and reviews from festival events as they happen. The online archive reaches back across many years of the magazine's output and includes, for example, its Karlovy Vary festival reporting, its annual assessments of the film year, and interviews with Austrian and international filmmakers. For a small print magazine, this open archive is strategically important: it makes two decades of Austrian film criticism searchable and citable, and it is one of the reasons ray is quoted in academic and institutional contexts, from university film-studies collections to Austrian Film Institute publications.

Place in Austrian Film Culture

ray's significance lies in the completeness of the niche it fills. Austria in the twenty-first century has had a film culture out of proportion to its size — festival prizes, an internationally recognised body of directors, and a dense calendar of festivals led by the Viennale and the Diagonale. Such a culture needs its own critical record in its own language, and ray has supplied it since 2001: through the PVS bankruptcy that should have killed it, through the shift of film viewing from cinema and DVD toward streaming, and through the transformation of magazine publishing itself. Its survival as an editor-owned title, its institutional partnerships, its audience award and its archive of essays and interviews make ray less a disposable listings magazine than part of the infrastructure of Austrian cinema — the magazine in which Austrian film culture has, for twenty-five years, talked to itself and to its public.