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Richard Linklater
FILMTIPS FOR TODAY
COVER-UP
Dir: Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus
USA 2025 | 117 minutes | OV w/ ENG subtitles
Monday, October 27, 1 pm: GARTENBAUKINO
Tuesday, October 28, 4.15 pm: URANIA
Now in his late eighties and with a career stretching from 1969 to the present, American investigative journalist and author Seymour “Sy” Hersh is a living legend, having exposed some of the most consequential scandals in modern US history. With their powerful documentary, Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus honour a man who has devoted his life to uncovering the harshest of truths. Poitras had already tried to interview him two decades ago, but Hersh declined; now, with Obenhaus’s support, she finally won his consent. The film feels like a legacy—a chronicle of his relentless quest for accountability. We meet him in his paper-strewn office: sharp, caustic, and dry-witted. Questioned by the filmmakers, Hersh, an engaging storyteller, revisits his life: the son of Yiddish-speaking Jews expected to run his father’s dry-cleaning business, his path to journalism was anything but certain. Yet in 1969, he broke the story of the US-perpetrated My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. He later reported on Watergate, the “Family Jewels”, the Gulf War, Abu Ghraib, and more. Far from reverential, COVER-UP weaves together extensive material into a striking portrait of a man defined by integrity and civic duty. Defending free speech has never been more urgent. (Maria Giovanna Vagenas)
¡Caigan las rosas blancas!
Dir: Albertina Carri
Argentina, Brazil, Spain 2025 | 122 minutes | OV w/ENG subtitles
Monday, October 27, 12.45 pm: URANIA
Tuesday, October 28, 6.15 pm: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
Like a species not yet catalogued by botany, Albertina Carri’s latest film is unclassifiable. Mutation defines the progression of its narrative: a director abandons a film set before travelling to Misiones, in Argentina’s northeast, with three members of her crew. Later, they arrive in São Paulo to make a documentary on aporophobia—the irrational fear of poverty and the poor—with several shots filmed on Super 8 with undeniable elegance. In the midst of the shoot, the camera discovers an old woman as enigmatic as she is magnetic, who leads the four protagonists to a flower market and from there to a vast sea of plants. A lesbian road movie, a horror film, a documentary or a vampire tale? The enduring cinematic ideas and intermittent citations of cultural traditions help to alleviate the confusion that a rhizomatic film such as this can inspire—one with the narrative fluidity of a dream and the eloquence of free association. “Plants are the cosmic tumour of humanism,” says one character. The statement belongs to Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia and may serve as a guide to this playful meditation on the contingency of our species. (Roger Koza)
In presence of Albertina Carri and Carolina Alamino.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
Dir: Kahlil Joseph
USA, Ghana 2025 | 113 minutes | OV
Monday, October 27, 11.00 pm: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
The opening shot of the cover of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience is, like many things in this film, at once a declaration of principles and a red herring. The first feature by artist and music video director Kahlil Joseph is no mere accumulation of facts, but rather an encyclopedia of Black imagination. Wildly combining a futuristic ship which inverts the transatlantic slave trade with biographic takes on W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey; elements of autofiction with a deliberately profane grasp of film history; and computer-generated imagery with amateur works by anonymous creators, BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS assembles a sonic and visual machine inspired by a long lineage of thinkers. Despite being explicitly based on the works of contemporary intellectuals such as Fred Moten, Arthur Jafa, Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman (with the latter two both credited as co-writers), it hardly feels academic. The freshness of the material, the musicality of the editing and the restless rhythm deftly translate the “everyday anarchy” of Black experience into cinematic terms, as Hartman proposes. By “drifting between categories”, as one character says, the film dances its way out of convention. (Victor Guimarães)
SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY
Milagros Mumenthaler
Director of
LAS CORRIENTES
Julia Ducournau
Director of
ALPHA
Nadav Lapid
Director of
KEN
Ignacio Agüero
Director of
CARTAS A MIS PADRES MUERTOS
Albertina Carri
Director of
¡Caigan las rosas blancas!
Carolina Alamino
Actress in
¡Caigan las Rosas Blancas!
Alissa Jung
Director of
PATERNAL LEAVE - 3 TAGE MEER
Luca Marinelli
Juli Grabenhenrich
Director of
PATERNAL LEAVE - 3 TAGE MEER
Carolina Steinbrecher
Director of Photography
PATERNAL LEAVE - 3 TAGE MEER
Abbas Fahdel
Director of
TALES OF THE WOUNDED LAND
Nour Ballouk
Producer of
Tales of the Wounded Land
Marie Losier
Director of
BARKING IN THE DARK
Stefan Djordjevic
Director of
Vetre, pričaj sa mnom
Othmar Schmiderer
Director of
ELEMENTS OF(F) BALANCE
Stephan Settele
Co-Author of
ELEMENTS OF(F) BALANCE
Siri Klug
Director of photography
ELEMENTS OF(F) BALANCE
Arthur Summereder
Editor for
Elements Of(f) Balance
TALK WITH JULIA DUCOURNAU
Metro Kinosalon
Free Admission, 8.00 pm
One of the most outstanding filmmakers in contemporary genre cinema is our guest: Julia Ducournau has reimagined the horror genre from a European perspective in all its multilayered aspects, pushing its boundaries with both precision and conviction in works such as GRAVE and TITANE. On the occasion of her new film ALPHA, a conversation with Ducournau offers the opportunity to explore what can still be added to a reality already marked by unvarnished monstrosities. Fear as an aesthetic force, intimacy and the body within a context of mythological intensity—and the sheer pleasure in cinematic excess—may in the cinema of the “uncanny” serve as a portal to radical reflection.
In cooperation with Regieverband.
VIDEO OF THE DAY