In our VIENNALE DAILIES you'll find everything you need to know about what's happening around the festival!
Der Zuschauer muss die Möglichkeit haben, den Film zu entdecken. Schauen. Horchen. Staunen. Ein Geräusch. Ein neues Bild. Überraschung. Entdeckung. Einen Film anschauen, das soll sein, wie einen Menschen kennenlernen.
Angela Summereder
FILMTIPS FOR TODAY
ROOFMAN
Dir: Derek Cianfrance
US 2025 | 126 minutes | OV w/ GER subtitles
Wednesday, October 22, 12.45 pm: GARTENBAUKINO
Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) is a gentleman. When he robs a McDonalds and locks the employees in the walk-in freezer, he even lends his coat to the boss, who’s only in short sleeves. Jeffrey’s phenomenal career as a burglar began on his daughter’s sixth birthday, following her disappointment at his pitiful present for her. That’s when Jeffrey started masterfully cutting holes in the roofs of fast food restaurants to bring amazing toys home with him. Until the day he got caught. Derek Cianfrance tells the unbelievable true story of a likeable burglar who just wants to be a good dad as a slab of skullduggery as rousing as it is romantic. After Jeffrey escapes from prison in manner suitable for Hollywood, he hides out in a branch of Toys“R”Us, lives on kids snacks and promptly falls in love with single mother employee Leigh (Kirsten Dunst). “We moved on,” explains his ex-wife on the phone, “and you need to move on, too.” But that’s what turns out to be Jeffery’s biggest weakness. He can’t move on because he believes in love to the very end. Law and justice are not the same thing, and only those who also accept their wrong decisions in life can cast judgment on themselves. (Michael Pekler)
Sawt Hind Rajab
Dir: Kaouther Ben Hania
Tunisia, France 2025 | 89 minutes | OV w/ENG subtitles
Wednesday, October 22, 3.30 pm: GARTENBAUKINO
Tuesday, October 28, 1.45 pm: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
A black screen pierced by a thin white line reveals the sound graph of a voice. Like a dark shroud, it covers the film’s images at regular intervals. It is the real-life recording of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped in a car with the bodies of six relatives, all killed by the Israeli army in Gaza. As gunfire continues to strike the vehicle, she reaches the Palestinian Red Crescent by phone, desperately pleading for help. From this raw, harrowing material, Kaouther Ben Hania builds a docu-fiction that is both devastating and unforgettable. A group of actors embodies those who answered her call, imagining their words, their reactions, their emotions in response to such a heartrending cry. The film hits like a gut punch not only for its burning relevance, but for its relentlessly sustained tension, drawing the viewer into the claustrophobic space of its central tragedy—a stark emblem of a merciless assault. At Venice, it landed with a rare force, earning a twenty-minute standing ovation. SAWT HIND RAJAB is an unsettling film that forces reflection not only on the weight of its subject but also on how cinema can—and must—represent such events. A necessary vision and an essential one. (Maria Giovanna Vagenas)
COBRE
Dir: Nicolás Pereda
Mexico, Canada 2025 | 78 minutes | OV w/ENG subtitles
Wednesday, October 22, 1.00 pm: STADTKINO IM KÜNSTLERHAUS
Understanding cinema as a combinatory art, every work by Nicolás Pereda sees him imaginatively reconfigure the same key elements: a minimalistic film grammar, a fixed group of actors and an interest in the workings of fiction. COBRE steps away from the explicit exploration of performance of his recent films to stage a simple, yet suspenseful family drama set in a mining town in Mexico, where Lázaro, his mother Teresa and his aunt Rosa live and work. Lázaro’s time is split between the mine, hospital visits due to his health and outings with Rosa and her partner Harold. Seemingly uneventful, the days see a certain tension grow amid the tedium, particularly in Lázaro’s relationship to Rosa. Much like LÁZARO DE NOCHE (2024), COBRE is a film about desire, particularly as shaped by material conditions. The tension that builds as the film progresses stems from this desire, which is depicted entirely without judgement. As always, Pereda embraces ambiguity, as most of the dramatic cues presented unfold towards dead ends, while the deliberately sketched-out situations are kept hanging in the air rather than being developed further. We are thus given the rare space to draw our own conclusions; such is the generosity of Pereda’s cinema. (Salvador Amores)
PROGRAM TIP
CINEMATOGRAPHY CARLOS AMORALES
Find out more about the cinematography HERE.
For Carlos Amorales, cinema is just one of many locations. The multidisciplinary artist was was born in Mexico City in 1970, studied in the Netherlands and has been participating in international exhibitions for many years. He works in the media of video, animation, graphics, painting, sculpture, and performance. His filmic works are thus to be seen as part of a multifaceted oeuvre that is always shaped by social critique.
Both the films shown in this program, which complement each other, are also about resistance in the form of a radical visual and body language. Amorales’s view of the world is political: How can humans, relegated to the body and to language as means of expression, exist within a system? What possibilities are there to rebel, even as an artist?
“I have always liked uprooting, unsettling myself in my work,” Amorales said, “[…] rebelling … against the art market and its ‘star system,’ and being a sort of chameleon who sometimes turns the wrong color, that looks like one thing but is in fact something else.”
Amsterdam and El hombre que hizolas cosas prohibidas
Wednesday, October 22, 4.00 pm: METRO, HISTORISCHER SAAL
Dir: Carlos Amorales
Mexico 2013 | 22 minutes | no dialogue
In 2013, Carlos Amorales published the “Ideological Cubism Manifesto”, which stipulates that art must consider reality from a multitude of political perspectives. This theory led to the production of three short films, two of which are screening at the Viennale. The first, AMSTERDAM, attempts a supra-linguistic form of communication based primarily on physical gestures and animalistic sounds. Improvised by Philippe Eustachon and Elsa-Louise Manceaux from an image-based score, AMSTERDAM exemplifies the manifesto’s insistence that “humans are not a level and systematic clockwork mechanism.” Made in Chile, EL HOMBRE QUE HIZO TODAS LAS COSAS PROHIBIDAS was inspired by the Pinochet government’s embrace of neoliberal capitalism. A complex, surrealist narrative that pulls from a variety of aesthetic traditions, EL HOMBRE finds Amorales again exploring the radical potential of irrational communication. (Michael Sicinski)
El hombre que hizolas cosas prohibidas
Dir: Carlos Amorales
Mexico, Chile 2014 | 40 minutes | OV w/ ENG subtitles
In 2013, Carlos Amorales published the “Ideological Cubism Manifesto”, which stipulates that art must consider reality from a multitude of political perspectives. This theory led to the production of three short films, two of which are screening at the Viennale. The first, AMSTERDAM, attempts a supra-linguistic form of communication based primarily on physical gestures and animalistic sounds. Improvised by Philippe Eustachon and Elsa-Louise Manceaux from an image-based score, AMSTERDAM exemplifies the manifesto’s insistence that “humans are not a level and systematic clockwork mechanism.” Made in Chile, EL HOMBRE QUE HIZO TODAS LAS COSAS PROHIBIDAS was inspired by the Pinochet government’s embrace of neoliberal capitalism. A complex, surrealist narrative that pulls from a variety of aesthetic traditions, EL HOMBRE finds Amorales again exploring the radical potential of irrational communication. (Michael Sicinski)
In the presence of Carlos Amorales.
VIENNALE TALK: LUCRECIA MARTEL
Wednesday, October 22, 6.15 pm - Metro, Kinosalon
Free admission!
One of the wonders that continually reveals itself in Martel’s films is the sudden appearance of what had previously remained invisible—an experience that compels recognition rather than merely offering it. Martel’s unique form of confrontation—uncompromising yet understood as necessary—with collective memory and its gaping wounds runs through her work. Fearless and sensual, as resolute as she is sensitive, she traces the very substance upon which “orders” have been constructed. Social, political, and ultimately personal systems whose fault lines must be persistently stretched. In conversation with Kathrin Resetarits, the focus will be on the practical, ethical, and intellectual methods required to “re-think” cinema as a critical form of engaging with the world—and, as so characteristic of Martel, to employ it equally as a poetic practice.
In cooperation with Drehbuchforum Wien.
TEXTUR #8
The eighth volume of our publication series Textur is dedicated to the Argentine screenwriter and director Lucrecia Martel. In their essays, Luciano Monteagudo and Eduardo Cadava explore Martel’s body of work from distinct yet complementary perspectives. Additional insights come from a conversation with two of Martel’s close collaborators: director and actress Maria Alché, and Ernesto de Carvalho, one of the cinematographers of her most recent film.
Available at all Viennale box offices and in our webshop!
SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY
Angela Summereder
Director of
B wie BARTLEBY
MONGRAFIE: ANGELA SUMMEREDER
Oscar Ruiz Navia
Director of
Ya se ven los tigres en la lluvia
Vladlena Sandu
Director of
MEMORY
Pavel Cuzuioc
Director of
GRÜNES LICHT
Anna Kirst
Editor of
GRÜNES LICHT
Sergio Oksman
Director of
Una pelicula de miedo
Fabrice Aragno
Director of
L'Atelier Rolle - un voyage
LE LAC
