In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!
I'm interested in the world of prisoners
(Lisandro Alonso)
NEED SOME FILMTIPS? HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS!
LE GRAND CHARIOT
Philippe Garrel | Switzerland, France 2022 | 95 min
Saturday, October 21: 12.45 pm - Gartenbaukino (OV w/ EN subtitles)
Saturday, October 28: 3.30 pm - Gartenbaukino (OV w/ GER subtitles)
The script of Philippe Garrel’s latest film is forged from steel, with camera movements as precise as the microscopic mechanisms of a Swiss watch. Such respect for the inner life of his characters is shown that we enter their consciences without the need for a single word to express their specific condition. Set in the present day, the story focuses on the vicissitudes of a family of puppeteers. The father, his mother and his three children have been performing different children’s theatre classics for decades. They have a small theatre in front of their house and also tour the country. Their company is well-known and respected and has overcome obstacles of all kinds for that very reason. However, misfortune leads to a new challenge and everything changes. At this crossroads, Garrel imagines two opposing ideas that threaten the present situation: upholding a tradition can be exhausting or even fatal on the one hand, even as older artistic forms like puppet theatre can easily feel inadequate due to younger generations’ lack of interest in them. LE GRAND CHARIOT raises a question that hardly just concerns the world of puppeteers: how can a tradition that has become a minority practice, like Garrel’s cinema, resist? (Roger Koza)
HOKAGE
Tsukamoto Shinya | Japan 2023 | 96 min | OV w/ EN subtitles
Saturday, October 21: 11.15 pm - Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus
Friday, October 27: 1.30 pm - Urania
At first glance, the latest film by the cult director Tsukamoto Shinya will draw comparisons to nightmarish anti-war classics like Elem Klimov’s IDI I SMOTRI, which follows a child protagonist plunged into a world of violence and brutality. In HOKAGE, the third instalment in the director’s trilogy (NOBI, 2014; ZAN, 2018) about the human consequences of war, Tsukamoto explores the ruins of post-World War II Japan through the eyes of a nameless orphan (Oga Tsukao). As the boy struggles to obtain basic needs like food and shelter, he encounters a sickly sex worker living in an abandoned ramen shop; later, he is recruited for a shady job by an ex-soldier suffering from extreme PTSD. Best known for his grisly cyberpunk tragedy TETSUO, Tsukamoto takes an unconventionally minimalistic approach here to the depiction of wartime devastation, presenting the boy’s fablelike journey as a sparse near-chamber piece set in cramped dwellings and depopulated dirt roads. For Tsukamoto, there is nothing awe-inspiring or epic about systematic bloodshed; HOKAGE, instead, shows us defamiliarised spaces and people warped by trauma as the context for a child’s moral awakening as well as his coming-of-age. (Beatrice Loayza)
UN ANDANTINO
Alejo Moguillansky | Argentina 2023 | 65 min | OV w/ EN subtitles
Saturday, October 21: 1.45 pm - Urania
UN ANDANTINO is about an unfinished, unused sequence of Alejo Moguillansky’s earlier film LA VENDEDORA DE FÓSFOROS, in which pianist Margarita Fernández analyses Bresson’s use of Schubert’s Sonata in A Major in AU HASARD BALTHAZAR. Yes, it’s that specific. Can the obsessions of two Argentinian artists with an Austrian composer and a French filmmaker justify an entire movie? Yes, but only if it is rigorous enough to avoid mere ego and transfigure it into something else. Like most of Moguillanksy’s films, UN ANDANTINO is self-reflective, intricate, auto-fictional. Unlike them, it is not a comedy. His essayistic tendencies come to the fore in a vertiginous clash of visual and sonic superimpositions, crossreferences and layers of meaning, which pop up in overlapping streams of cinematic meditation. As Arnold Schoenberg wrote about Anton Webern, “Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath—such concentration can only be present when there is a corresponding absence of self-indulgence”. In UN ANDANTINO, the changing face of Cleo Moguillansky—who we’ve seen growing up in her dad’s movies—becomes a theorem on cinema and time. (Victor Guimarães)
EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO
Miguel Littin | Chile 1969 | 89 min | OV w/ EN subtitles
Saturday, October 21: 6.30 pm - Metro, Historischer Saal
Miguel Littín’s legendary debut feature helped define the urgently realist and political imperative that propelled the all-too-brief ascendency of the New Chilean Cinema.
EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO is based on the true story of an impoverished drifter whose seemingly inexplicable cold-blooded murder of a widow and her young children shocked the nation and sparked a fierce debate about the justice system and penal reform. Littín boldly revisited the crime to ask penetrating, difcult questions about Chile’s unjust class structure and the responsibility of the state towards its citizens. Following the tragically errant path of the killer—first from his childhood as an abused orphan who never received a proper education—EL CHACAL DE NAHUELTORO insists on holding to task the sociocultural conditions that shaped a life lost to indolence, alcohol and the dark forces that can push one to commit a heinous crime. The powerfully expressive cinematography by celebrated cinematographer and occasional director Héctor Ríos embodies the film’s gripping ideas, capturing vast remote landscapes and their cold indiference to the stark human drama unfolding within them. (Haden Guest)
SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY
Bruno Jorge
Director of A INVENÇÃO DO OUTRO
Leandro Koch
Director of ADENTRO MÍO ESTOY BAILANDO
Paloma Schachmann
Director of ADENTRO MÍO ESTOY BAILANDO
Christian Petzold
Director of ROTER HIMMEL
Langston Uibel
Actor in ROTER HIMMEL
Thomas Schubert
Actor in ROTER HIMMEL
Deniz Celiloğlu
Actor in KURU OTLAR ÜSTÜNE
Shane Atkinson
Director of LAROY
Matthew Del Negro
Actor in LAROY
Elly Senger-Weiss
Producer of LAROY
WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE VIENNALE CAMPARI LOUNGE?
6.30 pm: Talk with Lisandro Alonso
Highly precise in his view of people and their mysteriousness, of the interplay of space and body, and minimalistically clear in the elaboration of the mythologies and spaces of possibility in which his characters move, director Lisandro Alonso has found a distinctive staging style. (Reviewed in detail in Viennale Textur #6). In a masterclass he talks about his work.
Free Entry!
Afterwards, from 8.30 pm
PARTY: TEREZA HOSSA
Tereza Hossa is a cabaret artist and veterinarian. She lives happily and contentedly in the matriarchy and eagerly awaits what the soundtrack will sound like. In her own words: "With me it will be unpredictable - we are driving Tagada constantly."
Free Entry!
AND AT THE VIENNALE ZENTRALE?
from 23 pm
PARTY: LARS EIDINGER
At the last two Viennales, the musical evenings of actor and not-so-neo-DJ Lars Eidinger caused mass euphoria on the dancefloor. All the greater is the joy that he will be back again this year and take us on a trip through various genres with his anti-disco.
Free Entry!
PRESS
Viennale '23: Logbuch
Imagination und Fantasie bei der 61. Viennale