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.