Vienna  - Troubled relationships, bleak cityscapes, emotional voids: These are some of the topics for which Austrian filmmakers won acclaim and prizes in past years.

Revanche, Austria's nominee for this year's foreign-language Oscar at ceremonies Sunday in Los Angeles, is among a handful of newer films that steps away from the country's "feel-bad cinema" image while telling authentic stories.

The film's title stands for "revenge," as well as for "second chance." Writer and director Goetz Spielmann tells the story of Alex, played convincingly by Johannes Krisch, a driver at a Vienna brothel who holds up a bank.

Instead of paving the way to new opportunities for him and his prostitute girlfriend (Irina Potapenko), the plan goes tragically wrong.

Though Alex finds himself stranded in the small village where he committed the crime and starts a tension-filled affair with the local policeman's wife (Ursula Strauss), the film strikes an oddly poetic and hopeful tone.

"I think what is important for Austrian film ... is to move away from feel-bad films a bit and to have works with vigour and a positive attitude towards life," Spielmann said.

He said he believed this trend had already started, and that his film contributed to this emerging development.

It was a conscious lack of such positive attitude that brought Michael Haneke the Grand Jury prize in Cannes for The Piano Teacher in 2001, an unsparing character study of a troubled musician that was fascinating but hard to watch.

Then there is Ulrich Seidl, whose films Dog Days and Import/Export deal with with several forms of human depravity in the midst of Western civilization.

The work of these and other filmmakers led the New York Times to sum up their works as "feel-bad cinema" in a 2006 article.

"It's a bit of a cliché, which was good for Austrian films for a time, because at least it labelled us with a certain character," Spielmann, 48, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"That's a big step for a country with a small film industry like Austria and helps (us) avoid being ignored," he said.

Moving away from that image and from a focus on contemporary social issues, Austrian directors not only have started to tell different stories but to place them outside urban and suburban spaces.

Stefan Ruzowitzky won last year's foreign-language Oscar with his concentration-camp drama The Counterfeiters. Writing about the current crop of Oscar candidates, critics have lauded Spielmann's Revanche for telling a sparse but gripping narrative taking place in the Austrian countryside.

The new trend among Austrian filmmakers is to "enjoy telling their stories," said Gabriele Kranzelbinder, an Austrian film producer.

She produced Universalove, by young director Thomas Woschitz, a film made up of several tragic and poetic love stories that take place in six cities including Belgrade, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro.

Previously, Austrian filmmakers had shied away from such stories and kept an emotional distance from their characters.

"I think the reason is that it is dangerous to open yourself to emotions," said Kranzelbinder, whose film Universalove won the Max Ophuels prize for young German-language filmmakers in January.

"You stay on safer ground if you don't," she said.

However, directors like Haneke and Seidl had paved the way for other Austrian artists to make unusual films, albeit with a different worldview, Kranzelbinder said: "It gave others courage to come out with daring films." (dpa)