Films by Ludwig Wüst and Pablo Larraín

May 18 and June 9, 2016

 
heimatfilm (2016) sums up 18 years of Bavarian-Austrian filmmaker Ludwig Wüst’s guerilla cinema: “The family album opens, letters are written to the dead and the disappeared. Images of the siblings, the mother and the extended family create room for the more remote, fictitious figures who set similar questions in motion: the quest for one’s identity, the missing sense of belonging and the redefinition inevitably take imaginary paths.” (Dominik Kamalzadeh & Michael Pekler, Der Standard). On May 18, The Film Museum will host the Viennese premiere of Wüst’s fascinating heimatfilm, first shown at the Diagonale in Graz.
 
El Club is another special kind of “Heimatfilm”, celebrated at the 2015 Berlinale – and still without theatrical release in Austria. Chilean director Pablo Larraín has already gouged deep into the more recent history of his country with Tony Manero (2008) and the Oscar-nominated No (2012). El Club, to be shown on June 9, is set around a remote house on the stormy northern coast of Chile, where Catholic priests found guilty of pedophilia and other crimes have been banished to. “Not since Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac or Tarkovsky’s Stalker has desolation looked as mighty or as chastening. Even in that dankness, though, the film’s compassion is strongly felt, its mordant humor glinting like a blade.” (Ryan Gilbey, The Guardian)