Viennale 2025

Viennale 2025

In the Café Engländer, a coffee house on the Postgasse, not far from the edge of the Stadtpark in Vienna, you can order a Hurch Kaffee for €7.80. A Hurch Kaffee, named after the late Hans Hurch, artistic director of the Viennale for more than two decades, is a triple espresso, and on the window of the Engländer is a black and white photo of Hurch, standing alongside a waiter, holding several empty mugs by their handles. As much as Vienna is a city proud of its coffee, it’s equally proud of its film festival. The Viennale has built a formidable reputation as one of the finest festivals around, with its focus on artistic value over anything else resulting in a rich, expansive, and rewarding programme of films. This photo of Hurch, and the pride with which it is displayed, says a lot about Vienna as a city, and how the festival is as much a part of its fabric as the Albertina or a Wiener Melange.

This was my third visit to Vienna, and the first in which I’ve given myself the time to relax and enjoy myself. I spent three tired days at the festival in 2022 at the end of a week-long solo trip around Austria, and in 2023, I stayed a little longer and tried to do too much, splitting my time between as many new films as I could see and as much of the Raúl Ruiz retrospective as possible. It’s very easy to burn out at festivals, and the obligation to see as much as possible is a poisonous temptation I have fallen prey to many times before. This time, I saw a relatively modest sixteen films in the five days I was in town. A selection that barely scratched the surface of the programme, but a healthy amount of cinema all the same.

Among them, were two films from Radu Jude, a perennial presence at the festival and director of its trailer last year. I largely enjoyed the exhausting provocations of Dracula, in which a (fictional) filmmaker bereft of ideas haphazardly uses an AI assistant to generate various interpretations of vampiric mythology, reducing it to a series of artless vignettes. For Jude, these ugly images and idiotic ideas are just part of another wave of cultural commodification. There’s no difference between the fact that Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace has been transformed into a tourist restaurant and a montage of AI-generated portraits of the now far-right icon saying “I am Vlad the Impaler, you can all suck my cock” over and over and over again. It’s all born of the same impulse to rewrite the same myths, to spin the same stories in different ways to suit a different purpose. Everything is parasitic.

Jude’s other film from this year, Kontinental ‘25 is comparatively restrained but equally lacerating. Modelled loosely on Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ‘51, the film follows Orsolya, a bailiff whose eviction of a homeless man from the basement of a derelict building recently sold to developers pushes him to suicide. She is repeatedly reassured by her superiors that she did everything by the book and that she is not legally culpable for his death, but that doesn’t clear her conscience. Jude fills the film with long, meandering and often very funny conversations in which Orsolya recounts what happened in detail to several people, including her tired husband, a jaded priest, her fiery mother, a former student, and an old friend from law school, none of whose thoughts and opinions seem to help her. At the same time, the story is spun into a scandal by right-wing news outlets, weaponising Orsolya’s Hungarian heritage against her, and adding another poisonous angle to the pile. Like Dracula, the result is a knotty web of competing ideas, each one loudly pushing this woman closer to the edge of exasperation as her moral crisis is met with either morbid curiosity, casual disinterest, or outward contempt. But, tellingly, never compassion. Nobody really cares about this man’s death, or Orsolya’s guilt. They’ve got other things to worry about. And all that matters to the people in charge is that they can move on with their project now that this man is out of their way. It doesn’t matter how. Progress stops for nobody. As if to consolidate this idea, Jude closes the film on a montage of construction sites. 

Similar crises echo through several other films in the programme. In Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills To Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), Rico, an aimless young man who sells homemade alcoholic drinks on a beach in The Bronx, is forced to grow up fast and find a job when his sixteen year-old girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant. He moves her into his cluttered childhood bedroom, filled with Pokémon plushies, baseball caps, and sneaker boxes, and holds onto dreams of better things that sit starkly at odds with his reality. Vargas keeps the camera static for the most part, anchoring Rico’s environment in place as he bounces against its edges, trying to do what he thinks is right while constantly hitting walls. There’s an Ulrich Seidl-like richness to these images, with their stillness underlining the detail hidden within cluttered frames, as well as the horrible sensation of watching a person’s actions inadvertently making their life worse at every turn. But Vargas is a much warmer filmmaker than Seidl, and Mad Bills To Pay builds to a bittersweet moment of reflection, and a hope that Rico can turn things around even if this is not how he imagined his life would be.

If Vargas’s film captures a sudden arrival at adulthood, then Nastia Korkia’s Short Summer is very much about the loss of childhood. The film opens oddly, with two children stopping a car on a country road, checking it for bombs and demanding its inhabitants pay up in order to pass through. The car doesn’t contain explosives, only a young girl and her parents, who are dropping her off to stay with her grandparents for the summer. She spends her days playing games and having fun with local kids, while, unbeknownst to them, the Second Chechen War is being fought nearby. Korkia contrasts the innocence of childhood with the horror of war, which is happening right on the edge of this girl’s perception. Fragments of news bulletins are overheard on the radio, injured soldiers roam around the town, and, in one extraordinary moment, a seemingly endless freight train, carrying tanks and weapons to the front line, passes through, dwarfing the kids as they play football beneath it. Korkia creates an uneasy tension between the war and this picture-perfect summer, slowly building a suffocating sense of how insidiously the world’s horrors can bleed into the innocence of a child.

Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers, which won the top prize in Locarno this year, similarly situates a crisis in a backdrop of natural beauty, though in a more personal register. The film follows the creative stagnation of Li, a Korean screenwriter based in Japan, and continues Miyake’s long-held interest in people battling to become active participants in their own lives. In the first of two distinct parts, a lonely young woman visits a beautiful coastal town and meets a local man on a beach, and they spend a few long summer days together, before she has to go home. They walk around town, visit a museum, and swim in the ocean in a storm, until, suddenly, these images are revealed to be part of a screening of one of Li’s films. She and its director are taking part in a Q&A at a university, and when an old professor asks about her next project, she reveals that she’s struggling to make any headway with it. In Miyake’s cinema, the path forward is never where his characters are. There’s no point in standing still, waiting for something to change. It’s a matter of doing something to change things. And so, Li is inspired to take a wintry train-trip with her camera to a hot spring town in the north of Japan, where she drags herself through deep snow and ice and finds herself at an empty, run-down inn in the mountains. This journey echoes that of the female character in her own film, a film she wrote when she first moved to Japan, only now it’s a different season. Time has passed, but the impulse for new surroundings and new experiences remains. A change of scenery is sometimes all that it takes.

But not always. In the opening moments of Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents, Lina, an Argentinian woman in her early thirties, collects an award in Geneva, throws it into a bathroom bin, silently walks around a city, and jumps off a bridge into a freezing river. After she washes up on the shore, she returns to her husband and young daughter in Buenos Aires, neither of whom know that anything is amiss, and tries to go back to normal, only now with a debilitating fear of water and an emotional distance that seems not to have been present before. Mumenthaler isn’t interested in diagnosing what has happened to Lina, or what precipitated this sudden change, but rather in observing how she has to adapt her routine around it to maintain a facade of normalcy. She can no longer wash her hair, so to avoid awkward questions she asks a hairdresser friend to sedate her and wash it while she’s unconscious. She can’t empty the water from her daughter’s bath, so she pretends that she forgot to do it when her husband comes home. It takes more effort for Lina to do these once mundane things, and the toll of this effort threatens to unbalance her further. Imagined scenarios start to sneak into her perception. The deafening roar of traffic and power-drills from outside starts to overwhelm the soundtrack, and she sees her assistant jumping out a high window, only to realise that she’s been sitting right next to her the whole time. These breaks with reality never really go away, and culminate in a stunning moment in which Lina finds herself at the top of a lighthouse, imagining the lives of three women she knows as the light rotates around her. She isn’t as close to these women as these images suggest, so this sequence gives the impression of a projection on Lina’s part. How would she live if she lived as these women? And would her life be better if she was someone else?

The Currents is a film that asks more questions than it answers, and more and more this is the kind of cinema that I long to find at festivals. This sense of curiosity isn’t necessarily unique to the Viennale, but it’s a massive part of its success. In her introduction to the film, Mumenthaler said that this was a festival that filmmakers love to take their films to, and it’s easy to see why. You only need to look around after a screening, day or night, in the smoking areas outside the Metro or Gartenbaukino, or the cafés at Stadtkino or Urania, or the entrance of the Filmmuseum, just beneath the Albertina. People are always milling around, talking passionately about what they’ve just seen. And you can’t really ask for much more than that.

Ghostwatch | Leslie Manning, 1992

Ghostwatch | Leslie Manning, 1992

London Film Festival 2025

London Film Festival 2025

It’s been six years since I last went to the London Film Festival from start to finish. There’s just not as much here for me to get excited about as there used to be, so I tend to just dip in and out, catching the train into the city a couple of times to see one or two movies before heading home again. This has always been a festival that prioritises star-studded gala screenings over interesting and unusual cinema, but the pickings in that regard seem to get slimmer every year. I don’t really have it in me to pay three times the price of a normal ticket to see something like Ballad of a Small Player a week or two before it turns up on Netflix, and so my festival has become quite small. Having spent several years traipsing around central London for two weeks every October just to cram it all in, this year I managed to fit pretty much all of what I wanted to see into two Saturday afternoons. 

All of this is to say that I only really want to watch something at a festival if I’m going to struggle to see it outside of one. I can’t think of a film that fits into this philosophy more appropriately than Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, a three-hour film shot on the 3.2 megapixel camera of a 2008 Sony Ericsson W595. A film of absences, in which a man, Irakli, searches in vain for his missing daughter, Lisa, across the vast expanses and abandoned football pitches of the Georgian countryside, accompanied by Levani, her best friend who, without explanation, happens to be invisible. Many of the people they meet are heard but not seen, with Koberidze framing empty reverse shots as if they’re filled with faces. This is one of several leaps of faith demanded by Dry Leaf. The heavily pixelated images are muddy and difficult to make sense of, much like this circuitous search, which keeps hitting dead ends. Koberidze builds an impressionistic patchwork of people and places that evokes the sensation of a dream. Remembered details, like cats and donkeys and apricots, empty village squares and acts of kindness, serve to emphasise the spaces left by the things he’s forgotten, like the faces of the people he meets, or the indistinguishable football pitches that seem to blend into one. But there’s a melancholic longing to fill these spaces. On the road, Irakli often sees kids wanting but unable to find anywhere to play football, while the pitches that serve as landmarks for his search remain overgrown and reclaimed by nature. At one such encounter, a child asks Irakli to help push a heavy goalpost into the ground so they can play. He does, and they do. Dry Leaf suggests that while some things may be gone, they don’t have to stay that way. The act of trying to find them is exactly what keeps them alive.

Claire Denis’s The Fence covers a similar kind of search, only its conclusion is already written. In an unnamed West African country, a man appears at a construction site in the dead of night to recover the body of his brother, only to be met with evasion and resistance from the white foreman and his volatile deputy. Based on a play, the theatricality of The Fence largely works in its favour. These two men stand in spotlights and perform to an audience that already sees through them, from the man himself, patiently asking the same questions, to the armed guards in lookouts above, to the men who work in the kitchen, and even the recently arrived wife of the foreman, whose red dress and high-heels clash awkwardly with the dusty terrain and chain-link fences around her. These loud voices echo across the silent yard and through paper-thin walls. There’s no privacy here, no secrets. Just a series of distractions, and the desperate hope that they can get rid of this man before his quiet insistence becomes a problem for them. 

This defensive impulse echoes through Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, too, in which a university professor in Brazil in the late seventies is forced to run from corrupt political forces who will do anything to get him out of their way and siphon off his research funding. He’s given refuge in a small community while he waits for a chance to flee the country, but the threats against him, at first vague and unseen, gradually take concrete form. Mendonça Filho allows information to slowly coalesce over time, with scattered characters, contexts, and motivations eventually colliding in a single time and space. A film about hiding, or, more specifically, of being hidden, The Secret Agent continues Mendonça Filho’s interest in both the myriad pleasures of genre cinema and the communities that form when people stand up against political and bureaucratic aggression. But also, it builds upon the idea of the archive, of piecing together all the disparate angles of an event in an effort to make sense of it.

In Silent Friend, Ildikó Enyedi similarly presents fragments of information and asks that meaning be drawn from them. Not as a means of understanding specific events but as a way of finding parallels in the echoes of history. The film takes place in the same location, the botanical gardens of a German university, across three different time periods. In 2020, a neuroscientist from Hong Kong arrives to teach a course but is left marooned in the deserted university by the onset of the pandemic. In the 1970s, two students study how a geranium experiences and responds to its environment. And in the early 1900s, a young woman overcomes institutional and societal sexism and uses her skills as a photographer to study an assortment of plants. Enyedi cuts back and forth between these time periods on shared moments, like reading the same pages of a book in the library, or touching the bark of the same enormous tree in the gardens, focusing on the act of study and, more significantly, the connections that emerge from these studies. A neuroscientist reaching out to a French botanist over Zoom, a young woman helping an old photographer with his work between classes, and two students falling for one another via a shared interest in flowers. Enyedi has been exploring these kinds of awkward meetings in her work for decades, be it the reunion of separated twins in My Twentieth Century (1989), the frustrating missed connections in Tamas and Juli (1997), or the dreamed encounters in On Body and Soul (2017). In Silent Friend, it’s the simple fact that these people have been pulled together in the first place that’s most of interest. As long as there are spaces that encourage such things, there will always be people willing to devote themselves to solving the endless mysteries of the world, and work together to make sense of things they cannot explain on their own. Silent Friend is a gentle love letter to these spaces, to this quiet university garden, filled with rare plants and the enduring ginkgo tree that echoes through each time period, that has given those curious enough to do so the means of understanding the world for more than a century. For Enyedi, curiosity is natural.

Sho Miyake

The work of Sho Miyake has always seemed to be hiding from me. I’ve missed three of his films in Berlin over the years because their screenings happened either after I’d left or before I’d arrived, and whenever his work has played in London the timings have been awkward or unmanageable without either great expense or a very late night (often both). Most recently, I had the chance to see his newest film in Locarno thanks to a lucky piece of scheduling, but my trip fell apart for logistical reasons right at the last minute and I never even made it to Switzerland — of course, he went on to win the Golden Leopard. 

With this recent success, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and fill in the gaps myself. Well, not all of them, but as many as I can. As far as I can tell, there are (currently) no English subtitles available for any of his early features, which is a shame, and I just don’t have the stomach for his (somewhat inexplicable) Netflix miniseries Ju-on: Origins (2022), an endeavour I suspect will remain a curio for only the most ardent of auteurists in the years to come. That leaves me with three films to catch up on. An incomplete view, but a view nonetheless, and one that I hope will hold me in good stead when I eventually get another chance to see his latest. It’s certainly better than nothing.

And Your Bird Can Sing | 2018

In Hakodate, it rains in the summer. You always need an umbrella with you. Three aimless twenty-somethings, two men who share a bunk-bed in a tiny flat and an indecisive woman who falls into their orbit, spend all of their spare time together. Night after night they drink in bars, playing darts and pool and table-tennis, avoiding the responsibilities of adulthood while reveling in its freedoms. All three of them are at a crossroads. They drift through their lives, working part-time jobs they don’t care about or borrowing money from family members to keep the lights on, and they can’t seem to break the monotony. Empty time passes slowly. Miyake captures the mundanity of these long nights and bleary-eyed mornings with a gentle naturalism, quietly observing the minutiae of their interactions as this routine repeats itself over and over and over again. The only signs of clouds starting to form come through in brief gestures. A lingering glance across a room. A brief flash of recognition. The pretence of being asleep. They all tiptoe around their feelings, keeping things to themselves and hoping the rain will hold off a little longer. And yet their umbrellas are always close at hand, just in case. A warm film about how much you stand to lose from waiting. And how much you can gain by making something happen for yourself.

Small, Slow But Steady | 2022

In the first pandemic winter, boxing matches unfold to a few masked fans scattered around an empty arena. There’s no glory to be found here, but Keiko, a hearing-impaired young fighter, persists all the same. She trains every day at the boxing gym near the small home she shares with her brother, and works as a hotel cleaner to pay the bills. But the toll of fighting is becoming too much, and the gym’s finances have been decimated by Covid. This chapter of Keiko’s life is coming to an end, and as change approaches Miyake contrasts the comfort and familiarity of her routine with the unknowns and chaos away from it. The gym is a safe space for her, a precious one, where she’s surrounded by people who have found ways to communicate with her, whether by learning sign language, writing notes on little whiteboards, or miming the actions they want her to perform. But outside of it, she’s a small figure alone in the crowd, facing up to the challenges posed by a bustling city that has no time to make space for her. Masks make it impossible to read lips, and people loudly repeat their questions when she has no way to respond to them. Tokyo is a city filled with hurdles, but for Miyake all that can be gained from standing still is more of the same. However uncomfortable, moving forward is a question of embracing change and taking that leap into the unknown. Anything else is lost time.

All The Long Nights | 2024

Looking in and looking out. A haughty man, Yamazoe, whose panic attacks have forced him to leave behind a high-flying corporate career, and Fujisawa, a meek woman whose life-long struggle with severe PMS has made it hard for her to hold down a steady job, fall into each other’s orbit while working for a company building microscopes and telescopes for classrooms. The public manifestations of their conditions, be it outbursts of frustration or physical collapses, have drawn the concern of friends, families, and co-workers, much to their own embarrassment, but in this hilly suburb of Tokyo they’ve each found the space and the patience they need to rebuild their lives. They come together through connections made by others at a grief support group, where a former colleague of Yamazoe has built a friendship with Fujisawa’s boss, and it’s this idea of reaching out for help instead of suffering alone and keeping it all inside that Miyake seems most interested in. Apart, they endure their conditions as best as they can, but together, following the gradual development of their relationship, they help each other lay a foundation for a healthier life. Fujisawa gives Yamazoe her bike when she sees the difficulty he has using public transport, and he removes her from a potentially explosive situation at work before it becomes a problem. These moments of recognition can only happen in a safe space, with people looking out for one another. There will always be pain, but it doesn’t have to be endured alone. Given the right environment and the right people, there’s always a way to manage it. And then you can move forward.

Buffet Froid | Bertrand Blier, 1979

Buffet Froid | Bertrand Blier, 1979

Thick Skinned | Patricia Mazuy, 1989

Thick Skinned | Patricia Mazuy, 1989

I Saw The TV Glow | Jane Schoenbrun, 2024

I Saw The TV Glow | Jane Schoenbrun, 2024

One of the first images in Jane Schoenbrun’s second film is of a young boy walking beneath a billowing, multi-coloured parachute in a school hall. A film of vivid interiors, in which the light from outside changes the shape of the inside. A cult late-night TV show leaves an indelible mark on those who find it, and its images linger even as life moves on. TV offers a way to escape reality, but its glow illuminates parts of yourself that would otherwise remain unknowable. Time passes, the show becomes a memory, and the once-vibrant interiors become confusing and oppressive. The softness of the sun-kissed parachute gives way to the harsh neon lights of an arcade as it becomes clear that running away from the things you were once afraid of may have been a mistake. Now, there’s no monster of the week, nothing left to fight. It’s all been buried and lost to time. But the emptiness remains. The sadness, the fear, the discomfort in your own skin. And now it’s too late to change it.

Good One | India Donaldson, 2024

Good One | India Donaldson, 2024

The tide is always going out. A tranquil surface receding to reveal sharp and jagged rocks just beneath. Unspoken pains and anxieties waiting for a moment to surface, but they never do. The subject changes, the conversation is interrupted. Everyone is left alone together, walking silently through the woods. That is, until a single sentence breaks through, and poisons everything. A film about men who let you down, and women forced to endure those letdowns. A teenage girl, silenced and disappointed by two pathetic men, finds quiet ways to rebel against them, while the men shrink in contrition, as if their meekness might absolve them. But nothing can balance the scales, and so her pain remains. "Will you please drive?"

Tokyo Drifter | Seijun Suzuki, 1966

Tokyo Drifter | Seijun Suzuki, 1966

Illusions of freedom. Narrow paths for drifters to prowl as they're dragged back into the old ways, or behind bars or fences or glass. Confusing and meaningless conflicts are fought out of tired obligation more than anything else, with no way out and no way back. As the battlegrounds become more abstract, the stakes become more psychological. Battles for the soul: money and power, or honour and freedom. A man walks alone into a shadowy unknown, with no idea how narrow the path ahead may be.

In The Shadows | Thomas Arslan, 2010

In The Shadows | Thomas Arslan, 2010

All cars, no public transport. Everyone is in their own space, separated from the world by glass and metal, fully in control but reliant on things running smoothly out of it. Bad traffic, other drivers, closed roads. You can’t account for everything. Best laid plans can be uprooted by the unforeseeable. And so it goes, with a heist, planned and executed meticulously, silently co-opted from the shadows by external forces beyond anyone’s control. The camera jumps from first to third person. The hunter becomes the hunted.