66 Kinos

This film could have simply offered the recount of an elderly director’s amusing and narcissistic journey as he shows his latest film in 66 German movie theaters; however, it ends up being a remarkable and kind essay on a practice at risk of extinction (or in an out-and-out mutation process). It is not incidental that 66 KINOS opens in an old, stripped- down abbey turned into a movie theatre and closes with the words of an art curator on the relation between cinema and art installations – while cinema has captured time, time also captured cinema and transformed its very nature. At each cinema and in each city visited by Hartmann, he gathers evidence of it. In face of the advent of an overbearing digital ontology, Hartmann witnesses the last traces of an era without prophesizing the apocalypse – after all, he records in HD – but also without stopping to ask questions about the future of cinema as a collective sensory experience. (Roger Koza)

In the presence of Philipp Hartmann.