DAILY: Day 11, October 27, 2024

In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!

Mercy exceeds the question
of forgiveness.

(Alain Guiraudie)

FILMTIPS FOR TODAY

Miséricorde
Alain Guiraudie | France, Spain, Portugal 2024 | 102 min

Sunday, October 27, 6.30 pm: GARTENBAUKINO (OV w/GER subtitles)
Monday, October 28, 9.15 pm: URANIA (OV w/EN subtitles))

In Alain Guiraudie’s seventh feature, Jérémie (Félix Kysil) returns to his hometown in the French-Occitan region of Aveyron for the funeral of his former boss, the village baker. He stays with the now-widowed Martine (Catherine Frot), reconnects with a surly man he used to admire from afar, worries that the mushrooms in the undergrowth might betray him and receives help from the inquisitive village abbot (Jacques Develay). If this story sounds familiar, it might be that you’ve read the ﬁlmmaker’s 1000-page second novel Rabalaïre, which featured similar, albeit not identical characters and plots. In fact, MISÉRICORDE might be the ﬁrst time that Guiraudie’s literary and cinematic work intertwine with such clarity and casualness. The more sprawling his novels get, the more precise and tight his ﬁlmmaking becomes, with less dialogue and an inherently descriptive quality. Increased weight is given to fuller, unspoken shots and extreme close-ups, while great pleasure is taken in showing the shades of autumn in mysterious forests. As the protagonist enters a family cocoon that is not his own, the ﬁlmmaker mixes his village memories with libidinous fantasies in his own highly amusing, unsettling and moving way. (Antoine Thirion)

In the presence of Alain Guiraudie.

Wu suo zhu
Ming-liang Tsai | Taiwan, USA 2024 | 79 Min | no dialogue

Sunday, October 27, 8.30 pm: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
Monday, October 28, 7.00 pm: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL

Modest and unassuming enough to initially seem like minor asides, Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker films have emerged as a major corpus in the filmmaker’s late career, an ongoing collaboration with Lee Kangsheng that has now had the actor move at a snail’s pace through multiple different environs over twelve years and ten installments. WU SUO ZHU, the most recent addition to the series, is among its most ambitious, conceptual and compelling chapters, moving from the verdant periphery of Washington DC to the centre of the American capital, contrasting the bustle of train stations and street corners with Lee’s ever steady, ever meticulous advance. Similarly, in a gesture that proves the format’s ongoing malleability, Tsai oscillates between tracing out the different sections of Lee’s dérive and passages that show his more recent collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy in moments of quiet domesticity, never making explicit what—if any—relationship might exist between the two figures. Challenging not only narrative impulses and our distinction between fore- and background, WU SUO ZHU invites us as spectators to set ourselves free from specific cinematic or temporal expectations; to embrace the drift, to abide nowhere. (Jesse Cumming)

In the presence of Tsai Ming-liang, Anong Houngheuangsy and Claude Wang (producer)

PARADIES
Pablo Sigg | Mexico, Switzerland 2024 | 83 min | OV w/EN subtitles

Sunday, October 27, 9.15 pm: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
Tuesday, October 29, 1.30 pm: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL

For most of us it is difficult to escape the notion that the ﬁrst results of creation were paradisiacal. But Pablo Sigg’s LAMALAND trilogy subjects this notion to a Nietzschean revaluation not without humour and reaches a ﬁtting end with PARADIES—it’s not about Adam and Eve getting expelled from Eden, but how Cain and Abel are doomed to stay in the ruins of paradise. Shot single-handedly and single-mindedly on 35mm in the Paraguayan jungle, the ﬁlms share a kinship with the absurd universe of Samuel Beckett, the subject of earlier work by Sigg. Yet the trilogy is equally a Dantesque reverie and an epic existential journey. Following TEIL 1 (SATAN), which saw the Schweikhart brothers, the last descendants of an Aryan colony founded by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, kill each other, and TEIL 2 (TOTENTANZ), in which they entered a dark, smoke-ﬁlled afterlife, this ﬁnal chapter sees them emerge into an evanescent paradise. Turned into “a pair of clumsy demiurges” in the words of the ﬁlmmaker, they silently set about recreating the events from the ﬁrst episodes of the trilogy on a miniature stage. Will recreation change the eventual outcome? (Gerwin Tamsma)

In the presence of Pablo Sigg.

SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY

Juri Rechinsky
Director of
DEAR BEAUTIFUL BELOVED

Andrea Wagner
Editor
DEAR BEAUTIFUL BELOVED

Radu Jude
Director of
OPT ILUSTRATE DIN LUMEA IDEALĂ
SLEEP #2
VIENNALE-TRAILER 2024

Nahuel Perez Biscayart
Actor in
KILL THE JOCKEY

Bruno Dumont
Director of
L'EMPIRE

TALK WITH MIGUEL GOMES AND MAUREEN FAZENDEIRO

Viennale Zentralino: 6 pm

Talk mit Miguel Gomes und Maureen Fazendeiro

Portuguese filmmakers Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro can look back on congenial collaborations (in different capacities). Writing together is a special process that they will talk about on the occasion of their current film GRAND TOUR. Combining documentary and fictional elements, this film is an epic travel tale with direct references to the present day. A melancholy and humorous critique of social norms and the fear of the other. Moderation: Roger Koza

In cooperation with Drehbuchforum Wien.