26 Oct 2021

DAILY: Day 6, October 26, 2021

In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!

We have a great responsibility [...] and it makes a difference

Carlo Chatrian (Berlinale)

YOU CAN FIND MORE PICTURES OF YESTERDAYS FESTIVALDAY IN OUR GALLERY!

NEED SOME FILMTIPS FOR TOMORROW? HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS!

THE SOUVENIR II
Joanna Hogg
27.10.: 14:30 - GARTENBAUKINO
30.10.: 13:00 - STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS

In the second part of her self-exploratory diptych, Joanna Hogg fully realizes the Proustian implications of filming her memories. In the beginning, it seems as if the film just took off where the first one stopped, but instead of moving on with the emotional rollercoaster ride, the mourning echo of Anthony’s absence now takes over and relates all actions to the question asked at the very beginning of the first film: how to film life? How to film what really happened?
As Julia tries to cope with her life and make her graduation film about her relationship with Anthony, we rediscover cinema as a means to heal our wounds, not necessarily because everything works out, but because films and the exhausting ways of making them enable us to find new perspectives on existence. Rarely have the doubts of growing up merged so beautifully with finding one’s voice as an artist, such as in the sequences reminiscent of Hogg’s own first shorts when Julia gets lost in a Cocteau labyrinth of surreal memories and phantasies.This expressionist outburst stands in stark contrast to the casual and tender observations across the rest of the film, but also presents us with the discovery of a language that crosses the bridge between experience and film. (Patrick Holzapfel)

Image of movie Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song

HALLELUJAH: LEONARD COHEN, A JOURNEY, A SONG
Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine
27.10.: 23:30 - GARTENBAUKINO
29.10.: 11:00 - URANIA

When Leonard Cohen returned after a five-year hiatus with the 1984 album “Various Positions”, Columbia Records boss Walter Yetnikoff did not even want to release it. A foolish misjudgment when you consider that it contained one of Cohen’s most personal and influential songs in the form of “Hallelujah”. The LP’s small initial run was one of the reasons why the song is not always attributed to Cohen, but rather to Jeff Buckley, based on his sensitive cover. The documentary begins as a biographical search for clues that uses a single song to outline the Canadian poet and singer’s lifelong search for transcendence. “Hallelujah” is the right choice for this, because Cohen used the song not only to explore his relationship to his Jewish roots, but also to allude to ephemeral longings. He also rewrote it several times, adding verses about past love affairs and sexual revelations. However, no song and no cultural expression can escape interpretation.
In the second part of the film, Geller and Goldfine explain how the song changed in strange ways as more and more performers covered it – John Cale and Rufus Wainwright (for SHREK) are just two of them. Once a hymn to the incompatibility of search and fulfillment, the song was religiously simplified, flattened, and became a wedding hit. (Dominik Kamalzadeh)

STE. ANNE
Rhayne Vermette
26.10.: 13:30 - FILMMUSEUM
27.10.: 13:00 - STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS

Canadian Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette’s debut feature is a film about cultural dislocation as an everyday process. Centered on a family of Indigenous Francophones in rural Manitoba, STE. ANNE shows us a community rarely seen onscreen, and Vermette’s formal strategies, which often recall the physicality of Stan Brakhage, forge this paucity of representation into something palpable.
Renée has been gone for four years and suddenly wanders back to her hometown, and although nothing concrete is ever revealed, we understand that she was driven away by some shattering trauma. Renée’s young daughter Athene has been raised by Renée’s brother Modeste and his wife Elenore. Although the couple is willing to allow Renée back into Athene’s life, they are worried that she will vanish again, either with or without her daughter. As Renée reestablishes her relationship with Athene, she shows her daughter a photograph of an empty plot of land, a place she hopes to build a home. In its articulation of gender, trauma, and spiritual homelessness, STE. ANNE bears comparison to PARIS, TEXAS as well as Marilynne Robinson’s modern classic HOUSEKEEPING. But Vermette is primarily a visual thinker. Her rich, granular images depict the Métis Nation as a place of tremulous beauty. (Michael Sicinski)

BICENTENARIO
Pablo Alvarez Mesa

27.10.: 11:00 - URANIA

As the VHS news footage that opens the film reveals, when the Palace of Justice in Bogota went up in flames in 1985 as part of a violent siege, the fire also engulfed the judicial archive, countless documents that defined law and order in the country gone forever. BICENTENARIO seeks to fill this void by returning to the man who called the Colombian state into existence, retracing the path taken by Simón Bolívar and his army in the final stages of the liberation campaign in 1818. The striking 16mm images of towns and landscapes two hundred years later pick out any number of traces of the political leader along the way, alighting on ancient bridleways, statues, advertisements, celebrations, and official events as different people talk of their relationship to Bolívar in voiceover. And these indirect attempts to summon forth his spirit are given a wonderfully ghostly undertone by the séance narrated by the unseen woman across the film, an orange backdrop to house any number of projections.
History is so many things at once: books turned to ash, markings in stone and earth, each flag that is a copy of an older one, the man feeding pigeons in the square, a flame that flickers as the spirit approaches. (James Lattimer)

LA VEDUTA LUMINOSA
Fabrizio Ferraro

27.10.: 13:30 - URANIA

The third part of what could be considered a trilogy on the leitmotiv of walking, THE LUMINOUS VIEW (after LES UNWANTED DE EUROPA and CHECK POINT BERLIN) invites us to wander through the Black Forest with Emmer, an intransigent director who intends to make a film on Friedrich Hölderlin. Practical and optimistic Caterina, the production assistant, could not be more different from her travelling companion. Yet it is precisely from this distance that the spark of an unexpected complicity and almost loving tension will arise. Initially sceptical, she ends up becoming increasingly involved in Emmer’s pained meanderings.
The film progressively plunges us into a suspended zone, a wondrous walk through the forest that confronts Emmer with the untold mysteries of nature. Using an optical device that narrows and blurs our field of vision, Ferraro alternates between sharp and distorted images as his protagonist seeks an ultimate truth, hidden in Hölderlin’s last poetic words, which he tries to decipher by following his footsteps in the forest. Hölderlin inhabits every one of the film’s frames: his spirit is in the rustling of the leaves, in the breaking of the branches under Emmer’s frantic steps, in the protagonist’s endless repetition of the poem, and in his desperate hope for a final epiphany. (Maria Giovanna Vagenas)