The Million Dollar Bet

Austrian director Thomas Woschitz takes us to the dusty suburbs of Las Vegas to examine the decidedly unglamorous world of second-tier professional gamblers. Jack (Justin Cornwell) has had some success as a poker player, but his housemate Hank (Douglas Smith) is in the middle of a rough patch. On a whim, Douglas offers his friends a “prop bet”. He plans to run three consecutive marathons over a 24-hour period. Giving Jack 3-to-1 odds, the situation escalates, and soon there’s a cool million on the line. Hank is not a trained runner, by the way. THE MILLION DOLLAR BET is a small, appealingly scrappy film about masculinity in crisis, as Hank tries to become a winner by literally running in circles. The film harks back to the early days of American independent cinema, when it was possible for relative unknowns to gain notice with a low-budget feature driven by a sharply observed screenplay. What begins as a movie about compulsive bettors soon reveals itself to be a platonic romance between two friends at markedly different points in their lives. In the tradition of Amos Kollek and Amir Naderi, Woschitz brings an outsider’s eye to the US, revealing the latent surrealism of the everyday. (Michael Sicinski) 

In the presence of Thomas Woschitz, Gabriele Kranzelbinder and Sean Rogers.

Thomas Woschitz: DIE JOSEF TRILOGIE (2004), UNIVERSALOVE (2008), BAD LUCK (2015)