In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!
There is no border in my films. You can see yourself in these stories. This is the greatest thing about the power of cinema. It's very present. It's all there. You can't escape it.
Lav Diaz
FILMTIPS FOR TODAY
LEVERS
Dir: Rhayne Vermette
Canada 2025 | 92 minutes| OV w/ ENG subtitles
Monday, October 20, 6.30 pm: FILMMUSEUM
Thursday, October 23, 4.00 pm: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
Rhayne Vermette described her working method as “hyper open, process-based” when speaking about her remarkable first feature STE. ANNE (2021). Far from shying away from this experimental mindset, her rapturous sophomore feature once again defies standard narrative conventions and takes her bold approach to a whole new level. LEVERS hinges on an astral event significantly more surreal than your standard solar eclipse: all corners of the Earth are simultaneously plunged into darkness. When the uptight officials of a small town are about to unveil a monument, smoke fills the screen, then light vanishes before we can even see it. In a series of shuffled chapters headed by cryptic, tarot-like illustrations, humanity is plunged into the unknown and waits for signs from their cathode ray tubes. The feeling this evokes seems to echo the dark times we’re living in. Without indicating any simple way out, Vermette encourages us to travel down unfamiliar paths. And the beauty of LEVERS ultimately emerges from its largely unchartered setting: the filmmaker’s home province of Manitoba, where the Métis culture to which she belongs and the specificity of this unique place intertwine to create blissfully syncretic forms. (Antoine Thirion)
TWO PROSECUTORS
Dir: Sergei Loznitsa
France, Germany, Netherlands, Latvia, Romania, Lithuania 2025 | 118 minutes | Russian OV w/GER subtitles & Russian OV w/ENG subtitles
Monday, October 20, 6.00 pm: GARTENBAUKINO (Russian OV w/GER subtitles)
Wednesday, October 22, 6.00 pm: URANIA (Russian OV w/ENG subtitles)
The USSR during the Great Purge. By chance, young prosecutor Kornyev stumbles upon a letter—an account of injustice—written in blood by a Soviet prisoner. The idealistic lawyer decides to investigate the case, unaware of the price he will have to pay in advocating for humanity. In TWO PROSECUTORS, Sergei Loznitsa continues his exploration of tyranny and violence, presenting what may be the most profound examination of totalitarianism in modern cinema. However, for the first time, he turns down the volume in depicting the virulence of evil, as well as the complicity that outweighs any resistance. The suffocating atmosphere of TWO PROSECUTORS emanates from the dead calm of Loznitsa’s approach. The film is almost entirely set in a labyrinth of locked, dark spaces. The sounds of heavy doors opening and closing create a kind of minimalist music score, while the movements of bodies from one cell to another morph into an orchestrated choreography. This kafkaesque world of endless trial and punishment no longer requires a connection to reality, while notions of evidence, morals and the presumption of innocence are similarly renounced. TWO PROSECUTORS renders all this as a collapsing, failed system that can no longer be relied on. (Evgeny Gusyatinskiy)
In the presence of Gunnar Dedio (Producer) on October 20.
Garnelius and A SOLID.O DOS LAGARTOS
Monday, October 20, 6.45 pm: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
Tuesday, October 21, 3.15 pm: METRO, KINOSALON
Dir: Julia Ketelhut
Germany, Austria 2024 | 49 minutes | OV w/ENG subtitles
It’s the summer of 2007 and it’s hot outside, but the bulk of the film unfolds inside an apartment within a former East German housing estate. There’s a man called Werner in his early sixties who, in a very twentieth-century way of denying reality, spends most of his time in front of the TV. The screen shows documentaries about animals and the sophisticated ways in which their bodies have adapted, like the woodpecker’s damping system for the brain. These become subtle metaphors for Werner’s life, which was shaken up both economically and emotionally when the Berlin Wall fell and his country of birth ceased to exist. The first line spoken in the film is a question—“It isn’t working?”—the rest of the film suggests answers. Werner’s 17-year-old son Karl doesn’t speak much, he mostly seems overwhelmed: by his little brother visiting from foster care, by the preparations for his father ́s birthday party and by the large, green egg that he lays. But despite interventions from the world of surrealism and even after the egg hatches, GARNELIUS retains a realist tone. A beautifully enigmatic allegory for the taciturn relationship between fathers and sons, including dance performances and pasta salad. (Anna Katharina Laggner)
On October 21st in the presence of Julia Ketelhut.
R: Inês Nunes
Portugal, Spain 2025| 15 minutes | OV w/ ENG subtitles
Crystals glisten under the Algarve sun, and bodies immerse themselves in spa waters. In this surreal place, salt permeates everything, crunching under the feet of labourers and crystallising on the sun- scorched skin of a tourist. Inês Nunes evokes an all-enveloping, uncategorisable terrain through sensuous cinematography and sparse dialogue. Her lens captures a world where the transformation of minerals and the stirrings of human longing meditate on one another, dissolving the boundaries between the elemental and the emotional. (Hyun Jin Cho)
In the presence of Inês Nunes.
SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY
Julian Radlmaier
Director of
SEHNSUCHT IM SANGERHAUS
Lukas Miko
Actor in
DRACULA
Maureen Fazendeiro
Director of
AS ESTAÇÕES
LES HABITANTS
Saga Garðarsdóttir
Actress in
Ástin sem eftir er
James Benning
Director of
LITTLE BOY
Fabrice Aragno
Director of
L'Atelier Rolle - un voyage
LE LAC
Jan Soldat
Director of
DER ANGRIFF DES ALFRED EDEL AUF SICH SELBST
Bingham Bryant
Director of
DOOMED AND FAMOUS
Friedl vom Gröller
Director of
CONDITIO HUMANA
VIDEO OF THE DAY
