21 Oct 2022

DAILY: Day 2, October 21, 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 world isn’t a sad place. It’s just big.

(Jean-Luc Godard, in memoriam)

NEED SOME FILMTIPS? HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS:

Image of movie Falcon Lake — Falcon Lake

Image of movie Mato seco em chamas — MATO SECO EM CHAMAS

Image of movie A vendredi, Robinson — A VENDREDI, ROBINSON

FALCON LAKE
R: Charlotte Le Bon
FR, 21.10. 23:00 Uhr: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
SA, 22.10. 18:30 Uhr: URANIA
Bastien is a French boy on the brink of adolescence who is spending his vacation with his family in a cottage on the shores of Falcon Lake, Canada. He is shy, terribly bored and a bit lost. The lake is allegedly haunted by the ghost of a boy, and Bastien eagerly explores the place to find traces of the spirit. When Chloe, who is a few years older, arrives to spend some time with her family, Bastien’s summer takes a different direction. In this world where parents and children live separately under the same roof, the protagonists play hide and seek with each other until the spirit of the lake arises. Even though this could be the plot of hundreds of films, few have been able to grasp the melancholy and solitude of a kid saying goodbye to his childhood. The warmth of the summer days and their slow tempo are impressively filmed in vivid colors on rich 16mm film stock. And if the awkwardness of the first attempts at romance is narrated with the same modesty as that of her protagonist, Charlotte Le Bon’s emphatic gaze brings all the oddities of that age to the screen with laughter and sensuality. (Rebecca De Pas)

MATO SECO EM CHAMAS
R: Adirley Queirós, Joana Pimenta
FR, 21.10. 15:15 Uhr: URANIA
MO, 31.10. 20:00: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
A remarkable futuristic (and yet entirely contemporary) political fantasy, full of anger at a dystopian scenario, which evokes the structural impoverishment of Brazil and the reactionary consolidation led by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his regressive and repressive policies. It is made up of fragments of Brazilian reality that mark out a territory that Queirós has transformed into a mythical location: Sol Nascente, Ceilândia, on the outskirts of Brasilia. Queirós/Pimenta imagine a budding rebellion led by two sisters, one recently released from prison, who have found an oil well on the land where they live and have started processing it into gasoline, offering it at a cheaper price to the region’s bikers who sell drugs. Far from proposing some kind of hybrid story, the intersection between documentary and fiction allows the filmmakers to extract testimonies and records from real situations here, encasing them in a science fiction story of outcasts in which loyalty, collective work and the spirit of combat are privileged. The nocturnal panoramas are characteristic for a poetics directed at the insubordination of the imagination, the starting point for breaking the power that sustains the abominable Bolsonaro. (Roger Koza)

A VENDREDI, ROBINSON
R: Mitra Farahani
FR, 21.10. 22:00 Uhr: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
SO, 23.10. 15:00 Uhr: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
In LA SOCIOLOGIE EST UN SPORT DE COMBAT (2001), a documentary about Pierre Bourdieu, the sociologist receives an envelope from Jean-Luc Godard. The letter inside is written in the style of his HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÈMA, with a montage of images and words that play with history and the history of its representation. Bourdieu looks blankly at this piece of paper and understands nothing. “Poor Bourdieu”, he says. Years later, Godard finds a better pen pal in his inbox, Iranian filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, who is writing from his gothic revival palace in Sussex. Filmmaker Mitra Farahani proposes and orchestrates this initially artificial set of encounters, which are supposed to take place every Friday for almost 30 weeks. As strange as it may sound, Farahani turns all this into a real film. Godard and Golestan both play their characters well, creating a comedy of artistry and old age, each creating parody of his own: one plays the lord and the other plays the tramp. The images are as hilarious as they are intimate, as Farahani records Golestan, while Fabrice Aragno follows Godard. All four filmmakers act and react. The correspondence is rich, full of self-narrations and enigmas that end up creating a relationship. What are portraits if not the artificial accounts of their own ties? (Lucía Salas)

KAIGENREI: Opening of the Retrospective!
R: Yoshida Kijū
FR, 21.10. 20:30 Uhr: FILMMUSEUM
The third film of Yoshida’s trilogy about historical events in 20th-century Japan, COUP D’ÉTAT depicts the late years of the author, intellectual and political philosopher Kita Ikki – often described as “ideological father of Japanese fascism” – who was executed in 1937 as the alleged spiritual leader of two attempted coup d’états.
In the 1960s, Japan’s New Left was fascinated by the right-wing ideologue and his “Plan for the Reshaping of Japan” published in 1919, in which he also drew on Marxist ideas for his vision of a resurgent, nationalist empire. This plan was invoked by the young officers who rose up again in armed rebellion and staged a coup on February 26, 1936, frustrated by Japan’s disintegration under the influence of the West and the failed coup in May 1932. In COUP D’ÉTAT, Yoshida embeds these historical events into the flow of Kita Ikki’s everyday life and artfully takes stock of the impossibility of a revolution loyal to the emperor. From the perspective of power, as Yoshida suggests, right wing and left wing, socialist revolution and the imperial system both pass through each other and run in parallel. After COUP D’ÉTAT, Yoshida entered a hiatus which lasted for thirteen years until his next feature film A PROMISE (NINGEN NO YAKUSOKU, 1986). (Roland Domenig)