For the sixth edition of the LUX Audience Award, five films have been nominated, which will be screened with free admission from Thursday, October 30, to Sunday, November 2, at Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus. And your vote will help decide the winning film!
Thursday, Ocotber 30, 5.30 pm
AFFEKSJONSVERDI (SENTIMENTAL VALUE)
Director: Joachim Trier | Norway, France, Denmark, Germany 2025, 135 min | OV w/german subtitles
With: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning
Winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Festival, the sprawling intergenerational drama AFFEKSJONSVERDI sees writer-director Joachim Trier teaming up once more with Renate Reinsve, the breakout star of his celebrated existential rom-com VERDENS VERSTE MENNESKE (2021). Reinsve plays Nora, a gifted stage and television actress we first see having an uproarious backstage breakdown before her opening night performance of Chekhov’s The Seagull. When her estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), reappears, he offers her a part in film he’s written about his mother, who was tortured by Nazis and died by suicide. Nora refuses, leading Gustav to cast a Hollywood actress (Elle Fanning) in her stead. By turning their Oslo family home into his own film set, Gustav upends not just Nora’s life but that of her more well-adjusted sister (Inga Lilleaas), a former child actor who starred in one of Gustav’s early films. Brimming with familial resentments and artistic anxieties yet distinguished by an awkward, understated sense of humour, AFFEKSJONSVERDI is an absorbing ensemble piece about exploitation, memory and legacy—and the power of artistic creation to both heal past wounds and defer hard truths. (Beatrice Loayza)
Friday, October 31, 6 pm
YEK TASADOF-E SADEH (IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT)
Director: Jafar Panahi | Iran, France, Luxembourg 2025 | 105 min | OV w/german subtitles
With: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten
Vahid, who was once imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian authorities, meets a man he believes to have been his most sadistic torturer. He can’t be sure though, as he was blindfolded during the interrogations. Intent on violent revenge but afraid of hurting an innocent person, he kidnaps the man and asks another former inmate to corroborate his suspicion. Neither absolutely confident, they decide to track down other survivors. The group keeps growing as they drive around in Vahid’s van with their prisoner in tow, desperately pursuing a certainty that remains just beyond reach. A taut thriller nuanced by an undercurrent of absurdist farce, YEK TASADOF-E SADEH, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, is Jafar Panahi’s most outspoken and explicitly political film to date. That it was made after he was himself released from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison gives the story an obvious autobiographical dimension. Yet its moral implications extend beyond the personal to encompass all of Iranian society in the wake of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Now that new freedoms have been achieved, opening an unprecedented window of opportunity, the film sets the desire for vengeance against the imperative to keep pushing forward. (Giovanni Marchini Camia)
Saturday, November 1, 4 pm
CHRISTY
Director: Brendan Canty | Ireland, United Kingdom 2025 | 94 min | OV w/german subtitles
With: Danny Power, Diarmuid Noyes, Emma Willis, Chris Walley
Coming from a foster family, the withdrawn Christy moves in with his older half-brother Shane, who lives with his wife and child in a working-class neighborhood in Cork, Ireland; it is meant to be a temporary solution. But the once-familiar surroundings confront the now 17-year-old not only with fragmented memories of a difficult childhood with a drug-addicted mother. Reunions and new encounters also awaken in him a sense of belonging and a fragile optimism. In his debut film, Canty tells a story against miserabilism, portraying a community that – despite precarious living conditions and marginalization – takes care of one another. (Alexandra Seitz)
Saturday, November 1, 6 pm
SORDA (DEAF)
Director: Eva Libertad | Spain 2025 | 99 min | OV w/german subtitles
With: Miriam Garlo, Álvaro Cervantes, Elena Irureta, Joaquín Notario
Ángela and Héctor are a happy couple, and Ángela’s deafness in no way clouds their closeness. But when Ángela has a child, things become more complicated. The relief that their daughter’s hearing is “normal” soon gives way to Ángela’s feeling of being excluded from the world of the hearing. Director Eva Libertad and her sister, the deaf lead actress Miriam Garlo, convey in this gripping relationship drama the many challenges a woman without hearing faces in an often thoughtless environment, rendered in emotionally tangible detail. Yet withdrawal is not an option: communication remains the key to success. (Lars Penning)
Sunday, November 2, 5.30 pm
LOVE ME TENDER
Director: Anna Cazenave Cambet | France 2025 | 134 min | OV w/english subtitles
With: Vicky Krieps, Antoine Reinartz, Monia Chokri, Viggo Ferreira-Redier
Self-determination in work, sex, and family life: for Clémence, everything is suddenly at stake when she tells her ex-husband that she is seeing women. Abruptly, he claims sole custody of their son – Paul is eight years old when he is taken away from his mother. In autofictional novels, Clémence processes the loss of her child, her fragile and ambiguous role as a mother, but also the experience of new sexuality. With sensitivity, Cazenave Cambet – adapting Constance Debré’s bestselling novel LOVE ME TENDER – stages the inner states of a woman whose certainties in life collapse. (Dunja Bialas)
FREE ADMISSION TO ALL SCREENINGS
Tickets available on the day of the screening from 30 minutes before the start, directly at the Stadtkino im Künstlerhaus box office. Reservations at stadtkinowien.at or via the reservation links above.
Vote at luxaward.eu.