In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!
If I can see it and hear it then I do it. There's no point. I'm not a jobbing director. I wish I were, simply in terms of my bank balance. But I can't do something that I don't love.
(Terence Davies)
YOU CAN FIND MORE PICTURES OF YESTERDAYS OPENING IN OUR GALLERY!
NEED SOME FILMTIPS? HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS!
BENEDICTION
Terence Davies
23.10.: 11:00 - GARTENBAUKINO
30.10.: 20:30 - FILMMUSEUM
Terence Davies’ latest film exhibits the high standards he has maintained throughout his career, focusing on historical periods, this time World War I and its aftermath. BENEDICTION meticulously recreates the complex world of its subject, anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden as a young man, Peter Capaldi later in life). But the film does much more than this. Through its extensive use of wartime found footage, as well as back-projections, unstable diegesis, and other experimental techniques, Davies explores the shattered souls of the men who were sent to execute the Great War. BENEDICTION also represents a new frankness in Davies’ depiction of gay desire. Throughout his life, Sassoon meets other men such as himself, who ache for “the love that dare not speak its name.” From a kindly military psychologist through a group of creative luminaries including legendary songwriter Ivor Novello, Sassoon discovers that he is not alone, but is forced to the margins of society nonetheless. In BENEDICTION, gay love is simply love itself, with all the attendant joy and heartbreak. And as Davies demonstrates through the frequent use of Sassoon’s mournful verse, warmongering and homophobia are simply two faces of the same culture of death. (Michael Sicinski)
In the presence of Terence Davies!
LES OLYMPIADES
Jacques Audiard
23.10.: 23:15 - GARTENBAUKINO
30.10.: 13:30 - URANIA
Jacques Audiard returns to the mojo of RUST AND BONE and THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED in this soulful, sensual urban portrait of two women and a man at loose ends in Paris. Named after a residential high-rise complex, the story begins with telesales agent Emilie taking in a new lodger, reflective high school teacher Camille. The mutual attraction is instant, even if it can’t last, and their passion shows the movie’s frank understanding of sexual needs and desires as part of basic well-being. Late bloomer Nora is the new arrival in town, attending university after a career in real estate, but, through a strange twist of events involving a party and a cam girl, she finds herself in crisis.
Joined by screenwriters Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, Audiard portrays these three characters each fighting to overcome some desperate weakness within and drawing on unexpected reserves of strength in the process. Shooting in richly expressive black and white with a camera that surges through a very 2021 vision of Paris, Audiard (with DP Paul Guilhaume) craft a raw look at romance and disconnect (with a realistic share of glowing laptops and panicked cell-phone calls). (Nic Rapold)
SERRE MOI FORT
Mathieu Amalric
23.10.: 20:30 - GARTENBAUKINO
30.10.: 14:30 - GARTENBAUKINO
SERRE MOI FORT is an actor’s film in two senses at once: there is the magnificent Vicky Krieps in front of the camera, playing the character that we see in almost every shot, and there is Mathieu Amalric behind it, a great actor directing his fourth feature. They share a trade and a task. Together they create an exercise in embodiment, an adaptation in which life is a text to work through. Grief, a key character in this film, appears in many forms. In the body of the actress, turned into gestures and words which flirt with madness. In the body of time, twisting and turning in the structure of this film, to a point where it is impossible to tell if time is moving forward, backward, or into a different dimension. A wound in time has been opened up through pain.
This is a film that thinks of embodiment and interpretation as the central craft of fiction, of creating a world of illusion which gives the audience the possibility of first seeing something happen and then being immersed in it, to fully experience the most confusing, blinding, disorienting of feelings. Feelings themselves are rare these days – in cinema and elsewhere – and SERRE MOI FORT works with the with full intensity. (Lucía Salas)
In the presence of Mathieu Amalric!
ATLANTIDE
Yuri Ancarani
22.10.: 21:00 - FILMMUSEUM
23.10.: 16:00 - URANIA
This is not a film about Venice as a place of longing but about its “backstreets”, the vast waterways of the lagoon. Director Yuri Ancarani finds the rare beauty of crystalline landscape there, inhabited by a bunch of youngsters whose meaning in life is to pimp up speedboats, living in a rhythm of adrenaline and chill-out. Daniele, the film’s serene lead, regularly carves his speed records into a bricola, one of the wooden poles.
While the film’s metaphoric title obviously refers to the myth of a sinking city, it can also be understood as an extension of Pasolini’s remarks on the borgate, now finding a proletarian youth that has lost touch with its environment (emblematic: the cutting of a thistle in the beginning). Video artist Ancarani goes with the flow nonetheless, while ATLANTIDE immerses the viewer in a nihilistic universe of sunburned bodies, liquid landscapes, and panoramic shots of barchino races. With its hypnotic score and images of shimmering colors and light, Ancorini slowly makes his story transcend its narrative frame. ATLANTIDE sets out on a powerful trip to explore the means of cinema, willing to take the risk of collision, somewhere in the pitch-black night. (Gunnar Landsgesell)
In the presence of Yuri Ancarani!
OBKHODNIYE PUTI
Ekaterina Selenkina
23.10.: 18:30 - STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
26.10.: 16:00 - METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
There is a text by Thom Andersen in which he says one of the smoke shots in James Benning’s 11X14 made him fall off his chair laughing. It was written in 1978, long before they became teaching colleagues at a film school in California, CalArts. Years later, the joy that comes from encountering this particular kind of structural wit – of framing, timing, and editing, of animating ordinary things in and beyond themselves – comes from another “CalArtian” in the form of Ekaterina Selenkina and her film DETOURS. Unlike its antecedents, there is a small plot in this film, which revolves around the dark web, drugs and Dennis, a young man who hides his various stashes in the urban landscape. The film is both a detailed observation of this wonderful, terrible world we live in and the need – the responsibility – to match this world’s texture with what stems from cinema. Each of Selenkina and Kurbatov’s frames (a cinematographer whose talent and luminosity has no limits) are full of electrifyingly political ideas. Why do we even watch movies? It’s all there, brief glimpses of precise beauty: the way a line escapes in and out the frame, the shadow of one building falling onto another, or a pseudo-lake surrounded by concrete. (Lucía Salas)
In the presence of Ekaterina Selenkina and Vladimir Nadein (Producer)!
SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY!
Jeremy Thomas
Protagonist of
THE STORMS OF JEREMY THOMAS
Azazel Jacobs
Director of
FRENCH EXIT
Aleksey Lapin
Director of
KRAI
Adrian Campean
DOP of
KRAI
Mina Mileva
Director of
WOMEN DO CRY
Vesela Kazakova
Director of
WOMEN DO CRY
Samuel M. Delgado
Director of
ELES TRANSPORTAN A MORTE
Helena Girón
Director of
ELES TRANSPORTAN A MORTE
Gabriele Kranzelbinder
Director of
MONEYBOYS
Barbara Pichler
Producer of
MONEYBOYS & OUTSIDE NOISE
Reinhold Vorschneider
Camera in
HERR BACHMANN UND SEINE KLASSE
Yuri Ancarani
Director of
ATLANTIDE
Fabrizio Ferraro
Cinematography: GEDANKE UND VORSTELLUNGSKRAFT
PIANO SUL PIANETA
(MALGRADO TUTTO, CORAGGIO FRANCESCO!)
QUANDO DAL CIELO
SEBASTIANO
COLOSSALE SENTIMENTO
LES UNWANTED DE EUROPA
CHECKPOINT BERLIN
LA VEDUTA LUMINOSA
Fabio Parente
Producer of
PIANO SUL PIANETA
(MALGRADO TUTTO, CORAGGIO FRANCESCO!)
QUANDO DAL CIELO
SEBASTIANO
COLOSSALE SENTIMENTO
LES UNWANTED DE EUROPA
CHECKPOINT BERLIN
LA VEDUTA LUMINOSA
WHAT'S HAPPENING AT THE VIENNALE BAR TODAY?
Freitag, 22. Oktober:
BAR: Ach (Our Latin Thing)
CLUB: Malefiz: EcleKtric (Vienna Shorts) & J’aime Julien
HAVE YOU SEEN OUR MATERIALS?
In "materials" we ask filmmakers to send us images, statements, stories, videos or quotes that were important for creating their work or are a documentation of it. Read all of them in our Blog!
Kiro Russo, EL GRAN MOVIMIENTO - A camera test exploring the market space which plays a significant role in the film:
PRESS
MUBI: Matías Piñeiro on Terence Davies' "Distant Voices, Still Lives"
Kleine Zeitung: Land of Dreams Hollywoodstar Matt Dillon beehrt die Viennale