The Austria country focus of the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival showcases mostly fiction features and comes after a strong showing for Austrian films at the Berlinale. But Christoph Schwarz’s Piggy Bank, which gets its U.K. premiere at Glasgow on Monday, takes a very different approach, mixing mockumentary and self-experiment in a way that has become the filmmaker’s signature style throughout his shorts, videos, and other creative works.

“The director’s plan to live for ‘a year without money’ interrogates idealism and activism while offering serious observations on the climate crisis,” says a Glasgow festival synopsis of Schwarz’s first feature film. “When the Austrian director receives €90,000 ($94,000) to make a TV documentary about living for a year without money, he immediately blows all the cash on a weekend house for his family. This is just the jumping-off point for a film that cleverly mixes fact with fiction to take a sideswipe at performative activism,...