In our VIENNALE DAILIES you will be informed daily about the happenings around the festival!
I have a recurring nightmare: I'm punching somebody but it doesn't hurt them
(Martha Mechow)
NEED SOME FILMTIPS? HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS!
LE GRAND CHARIOT
Philippe Garrel | Switzerland, France 2022 | 95 min | OV w/ GER subtitles
Saturday, October 28: 3.30 pm - Gartenbaukino
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)
EL AUGE DEL HUMANO 3
Eduardo Williams | Argentina, Brazil, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Taiwan 2023 | 121 min | OV w/ EN subtitles
Saturday, October 28: 6.00 pm - Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus
Monday, October 30: 9.00 pm - Filmmuseum
Eduardo Williams’ second feature reprises the global scope and desultory wanderings of his celebrated debut EL AUGE DEL HUMANO. Whereas that film crafted a parable of digital (dis)connection and exhaustion by moving sequentially through three image formats and countries, this one explores similar themes through a radically new form. Set in Peru, Sri Lanka and Taiwan, it follows a group of young people as they hang out and chat across these three locations. Despite the naturalism of its nonprofessional performers, the film’s treatment of its multilingual dialogue—littered with non-sequiturs and looping repetitions—underlines that it is no documentary. After shooting with a 360-degree camera, Williams selected his desired framing by viewing the footage through a virtual-reality headset, such that the result indexes his gaze while remaining emphatically machinic. Images bend and glitch; time and space morph and melt. The peculiar cinematography transcends any gimmickry, as Williams stitches together his disparate locations into a single fabric of disafection and dream, at once intimately familiar and profoundly alien. A poetic reflection on technology and experience, EL AUGE DEL HUMANO 3 is a world picture of and for our beleaguered times. (Erika Balsom)
In the presence of Eduardo Williams.
ESSENTIAL TRUTHS OF THE LAKE
Lav Diaz | Switzerland, France, Vereinigtes Königreich, Italy, Philippines, Portugal, Singapore 2023 | 215 min | OV w/ EN subtitles
Saturday, October 28: 8.30 pm - Urania
ESSENTIAL TRUTHS OF THE LAKE chronicles another chapter in the story of Lieutenant Hermes Papauran—and, by extension, adds another mosaic stone to the portrait of the Philippines that Lav Diaz has been assembling film by film. Papauran was introduced in KAPAG WALA NANG MGA ALON (2022) as a once-brilliant police investigator driven to madness and violence by the extremes of President Duterte’s war on drugs. ESSENTIAL TRUTHS OF THE LAKE begins before the events of the previous film: it’s 2019 and Duterte has withdrawn the country from the International Criminal Court, giving himself even freer rein to act with impunity. Driven to despair by his effective complicity as a police officer, Papauran attempts to redeem himself by reopening a 15-year-old case he was never able to solve.
Borrowing the noir trope of a detective tormented by a cold case, Diaz conjures up the past in flashbacks that blur the line between memory and nightmare. Papauran is jolted back to reality in the film’s final part, which was shot in the wake of the massive eruption of Taal Volcano in 2020. Doubling as a documentary record of the resultant destruction, Diaz’s typically imposing images are haunted by the question of whether a phoenix can ever rise from these ashes. (Giovanni Marchini Camia)
In the presence of Lav Diaz.
BUSHMAN
David Schickele | USA 1971 | 73 min | OV w/ EN subtitles
Saturday, October 28: 1.30 pm - Filmmuseum
In 1968, Peace Corps veteran David Schickele enlisted his Nigerian friend Paul Okpokam to film a light-hearted comedy about the adventures of an African in San Francisco. Schickele shot scenes of interracial romance, cross-cultural misunderstandings and countercultural joy.
It was a turbulent time both in the United States and in Nigeria. The US was facing civic unrest following the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., exploding into violent uprisings throughout the country’s major cities. After a relative golden age of independence and hope, the Nigerian–Biafran Civil War from 1967 to 1970 was a time of unspeakable horror in Nigeria, with the estimated dead including 100,000 military casualties and the 500,000 to 2 million Biafran civilians who died of starvation.
David Schickele’s original script was meant to end with the character’s deportation due to bureaucratic visa problems. Reality intervened, however and the film’s conclusion took a much darker turn… The Pacific Film Archives’ current restoration premiered during these turbulent times at the Il Cinema Ritrovato in June 2023 to an ecstatic reception. (Dennis Doros and Amy Heller)
In the presence of Gail Schickele.
SOME OF OUR GUESTS TODAY
Radu Jude
Director of NU ASTEPTA PREA MULT DE LA SFÂRS, ITUL LUMII
Bas Devos
Director of HERE
Liyo Gong
Actress in HERE
Eduardo Williams
Director of EL AUGE DEL HUMANO 3
SUGITA Kyoshi
Director of KANATA NO UTA
Timm Kröger
Director of DIE THEORIE VON ALLEM
Olivia Ross
Actress in DIE THEORIE VON ALLEM
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE VIENNALE CAMPARI LOUNGE?
Party: Stefanie Sargnagel
Stefanie Sargnagel was already dubbed the "most important Austrian author of the 21st century" by VICE in 2013. With her radically subjective works about life, her comments and observations on social media, and her caricatures for the weekly FALTER, she is shaping at least one generation – what does the soundtrack sound like?
From 8 pm - Free Entry!
AND AFTERWARDS IN THE VIENNALE ZENTRALE
Party: EFDEMIN / NEWA / ALPHATRACKS / SCHOOL
Efdemin aka Philipp Sollmann is a composer, producer and DJ known for his own approach to house and techno. As a longtime Berghain resident, remixer, label owner and sound artist, he proves this time and again. For his Vienna comeback he invites friends and companions to support him: Georgian techno representative Newa, producer Alphatracks, who playfully combines avant-garde and trance techno, and the collective school.
From 10 pm - Free Entry!
HAVE YOU ALREADY CHECKED OUT THE YOUNG CRITICS' CIRCLE?
For the first time the VIENNALE hosts a YOUNG CRITICS' CIRCLE. A group of young, international film critics are working under the editorial and organisational guidance of author and film critic Patrick Holzapfel on a number of texts dealing with the programme of this year's festival. This initiative is related to our commitment regarding the perception and discussion of film criticism in its permanent state of crisis..
Find the published texts HERE!
PRESS
Wim Wenders über "Anselm" - Viennale Talk
"Gute Besserung, Catherine!"
