In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!
The beauty of a movie is that you walk in, you don’t know anything about it, you enter a world that’s new to you, and that’s the magic of being transported.
Jim Jarmusch
FILMTIPS FOR TODAY
WHITE SNAIL
Dir: Levin Peter, Elsa Kremser
Austria, Germany 2025 | 115 min
Sunday, October 19, 6.30 pm: GARTENBAUKINO (OV w/ GER subtitles)
Friday, October 24, 10.30 am: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL (OV w/ ENG subtitles)
Following two unconventional documentaries—SPACE DOGS (2019) and DREAMING DOGS (2024)—focused on the lives of stray canines, filmmaking duo Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter return with the narrative feature WHITE SNAIL, where the two protagonists also exhibit a fondness for various animals. Set in contemporary Belarus, the film tells the story of Masha, a blonde, thin, fair-skinned model pursuing her dream job in China, and Misha, a tattooed, thickset painter working at a morgue. Played with extreme naturalness by non-professionals Marya Imbro and Mikhail Senkov, these two loners strike up an unlikely but profound friendship that will force them to confront their secrets and wounds. The worlds to which Masha and Misha belong are completely at odds. But as these characters form a strange bond, the fashion industry and the funeral business reveal equally unlikely coincidences and areas of overlap that subtly proliferate as the plot advances. By depicting how we and our bodies relate to sight and touch, life and death, reality and imagination, flaws and perfection, Kremser and Peter map two universes on to one another, leaving the viewer to determine where they intersect and whether they diverge. (Cristina Álvarez López)
In the presence of Levin Peter, Elsa Kremser and also of Mikhail Khursevich (DOP) and Stephan Bechinger (Editor)
As estações
Dir: Maureen Fazendeiro
Portugal, France, Spain, Austria 2025 | 82 minutes
Sunday, October 19, 5.30 pm: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS (OV w/ GER subtitles)
Tuesday, October 21, 11.00 am: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL (OV w/ ENG subtitles)
For her first feature as a solo director—following DIÁRIOS DE OTSOGA (2021), co-directed with her partner Miguel Gomes— French filmmaker Maureen Fazendeiro was inspired by archeologist couple Georg and Vera Leisner’s efforts to catalogue the Alentejo region of Portugal. Part documentary, part fable, AS ESTAÇÕES unfolds like a weatherworn letter, employing a motley set of techniques to embody the region’s varied textures and characters. Fazendeiro lovingly traces the region’s histories through archival footage, scientific illustrations, poetry, tableaux vivants and pure fabrication inspired by local legend. The result is a non-hierarchical imagining of southern Portugal, with coruscating images shot on 16mm by Robin Fresson and Marta Simões. AS ESTAÇÕES pans across pastoral landscapes, grazing debarked trees, herds of goats, rotting fruit, and a family performing Communist folk songs. As with Fazendeiro’s previous projects (including this year’s LES HABITANTS, also screening at the festival), ethnography and conscientious mythmaking go arm in arm, or branch in branch. (Saffron Maeve)
In the presence of Maureen Fazendeiro.
Belle van Zuylen - Madame de Charrière
Dir: Digna Sinke
Netherlands 1993 | 111 minutes | OV w/ ENG subtitles
Sunday, October 19, 2.30 pm: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
The genesis of BELLE VAN ZUYLEN reveals a great deal about the Dutch film industry. Digna Sinke conceived the idea for a film about the eighteenth-century writer, composer, and avid letter-writer back in the late 1970s. Composer Marius Flothuis asked her why no film had ever been made about this first feminist, who, at the crossroads of Enlightenment and Romanticism, maintained a passionate correspondence with the younger French intellectual Benjamin Constant. Yet, it would take more than a decade before the film could be made, as it faced numerous objections from the male gatekeepers at broadcasters and film funds. The result was both literary and lighthearted: the cast of stage actors were well-suited to the eighteenth-century language, but the staging also feels playful and ironic more than thirty years later. The melodramatic events are observed with curiosity: Belle Van Zuylen is trapped in a barren marriage and has fled to Paris to live. After an initial encounter with Constant, she decides to accompany her husband to Switzerland, where the intellectual love affair with Constant continues. The revision of concepts like Reason and Romanticism transport the film to the present. (Dana Linssen)
In the presence of Digna Sinke and Gerwin Tamsma (Curator).
SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Director of
MELT
Sophia Laggner
Assistant Director & Research for
MELT
Levin Peter
Elsa Kremser
Directors of
WHITE SNAIL
Mikhail Khursevich
Director of Photography of
WHITE SNAIL
Stephan Bechinger
Editor of
WHITE SNAIL
Maureen Fazendeiro
Director of
AS ESTAÇÕES
LES HABITANTS
Jaume Claret Muxart
Director of
Estrany riu
Sophie Ahrens
Producer of
Estrany riu
Francesco Wenz
Actor in
Estrany riu
Clara Rus
Color Grading in
Estrany riu
Anna Recalde Miranda
Director of
De la guerre froide à la guerre verte (Green Is the New Red)