30 Oct 2022

DAILY: Day 11, October 30, 2022

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

QUOTE OF THE DAY

The lies are in the dialogue,
the truth is in the visuals

(Kelly Reichardt)

NEED SOME FILMTIPS? HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS:

MANTO DE GEMAS
R: Natalia López Gallardo
SUN, 30.10. 11 am: URANIA
As an accomplished editor who has worked with Lisandro Alonso, Amat Escalante, and Carlos Reygadas, Natalia López Gallardo has mastered a unique form of cinematic pacing, one equally committed to hypnotic rhythm and gradual narrative explication. She brings that mastery to bear on her directorial debut, a complex web of systemic violence and individual culpability. MANTO DE GEMAS explores life in rural Mexico, an environment beset with cartel activities, sudden kidnappings and the constant, violent degradation of women. As the film details these various horrors, it also suggests how they become routinized and banal, contributing to a permanent state of trauma. Eugenia is a thoroughly crooked police captain who, despite her own implication in the system, is terrified when she learns that her son Adán has become a low-level gang member for the cartels. Meanwhile Marí, whose sister was abducted several years ago, herself becomes an accomplice to further kidnappings. López Gallardo’s film weaves in and out of various lives impacted by loss and devastation, showing how criminality eventually becomes its own inescapable logic, consuming everything around it. A radical work of New Mexican Cinema, MANTO DE GEMAS is a tableau of absolute dissolution. (Michael Sicinski)

ASTRAKAN
R: David Depesseville
SUN, 30.10. 4 pm: URANIA
A tough-but-tender evocation of rural childhood as seen through the eyes of its waywardly precocious protagonist, ASTRAKAN ranks high among this year’s most impressive debuts. It takes place among the rugged splendors of Morvan, a Dordogne region which has long been favored by the Parisian authorities as a preferred destination for the raising of foster-children: literary giant Jean Genet is the most famous example. Based on his research into the “Morvan children,” writer-director David Depesseville crafts an engrossing, empathetic and entrancing character-study built on the slender shoulders of outstanding newcomer Mirko Giannini. He is front-and-center throughout as Samuel, whose foster-parents Marie (Jehnny Beth, of British rock-band Savages) and Clément take in children for reasons more financial than altruistic. When Samuel’s complex psychology and his nurturing needs prove beyond this young couple, he is sent to live on Marie’s parents’ farm; this proves to be less than the safest of havens. A coming-of-age story of unusual intelligence, stylistic distinction and formal originality, ASTRAKAN is named after the prized dark fleece of newborn lambs: a seed of symbolism which finds full flowering in Depesseville’s remarkable, operatic finale. (Neil Young)

KAFKA FOR KIDS
R: Roee Rosen
SUN, 30.10. 18.15 pm: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
It starts without warning, just like turning on the TV. Pilot shows are always unpredictable, about trying things out and reaching new audiences, nothing ventured, nothing gained! Everyone loves Kafka, but has he achieved his full potential? The grown-ups have read him already, but what about the kids? They love playing with bugs, and Metamorphosis is about just that, let’s ignore Franz’s representational worries, we all know what a bug looks like! Kids should feel at home, so the studio is full of bright colors and household objects come to life, a motley crew of loveable characters happy to listen to the avuncular storyteller and sing along with the studio band. There’s a sort of audience surrogate too, a little girl who often seems confused, about the tale’s scary turns, about her own identity, about whether she’s really a child anyway: when do we stop being a kid, 8, 12 or 14? She looks like the woman who appears in one of the commercial breaks, the woman giving the speech about how Israel treats Palestinian minors under the Occupation, she’s also confused, by the stench emanating from her body, like dead cockroach in a squalid bedroom. But that’s what’s great about TV, we can always switch channels if things get sticky! Everyone gets the format they deserve. (James Lattimer)

THE KIEV TRIAL
R: Sergei Loznitsa
SUN, 30.10. 1.00 pm: FILMMUSEUM
The latest film in Sergei Loznitsa’s archival investigation of Soviet and European history is a follow-up to 2021’s Babi Yar. Context, which traced the sequence of events leading up to the notorious massacre of Jews by the German army in Ukraine in 1941. The film collates footage of the January 1946 hearings in which members of the German army were prosecuted for their role in atrocities in Ukraine both at the Babi Yar ravine itself and elsewhere in the country.
This time, there is no on-screen commentary, except that employed to identify the people on screen, while subtitles are used only to translate questions and answers in Russian: when there is spoken German, a non-German-speaking audience is left in the position of the Soviet courtroom audience, waiting to understand what is being said. The very different deliveries of the German defendants and the Russian legal officials represent two distinct, ideologically charged modes of discourse brought face to face – while the testimonies of Ukrainian and Russian witnesses, as well as some victims and survivors of the crimes prosecuted, speak another, more direct language, testifying to an immediate, barely narratable experience of historical truth. (Jonathan Romney)

SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY

Lav Diaz
Director of
KAPAG WALA NANG MAG ALON

Jonathan Perel
Director of
CAMUFLAJE

Jem Cohen
Director of
JEM COHEN. BALLADS (Short Film Programme)

James Benning
Director of
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Joanna Hogg
Director of
THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER

David Depesseville
Director of
ASTRAKAN

Elena López Riera
Director of
EL AGUA

Peter Strickland
Director of
FLUX GOURMET

WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE VIENNALE CLUB TONIGHT?

Sonntag, 30. Oktober -18:00 Uhr: TALK: JOANNA HOGGCelebrated just a few weeks ago at the Venice Film Festival for her latest feature film THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER, British director Joanna Hogg is one of the most important directors of our time. Her studies of relationships within the upper middle class, as precise as they are cool, and her reflections on art and life are solitary in contemporary British cinema. She will talk about her writing at the Viennale. Moderation: Wilbirg Brainin-Donnenberg

from 8 pm: VINYL-BAR: ALASKA AL TROPICAL (BOOMBOOMRECORDS)