Viennale bookended by Le Havre and The Ides of March

by Bénédicte Prot

20/10/2011 - As every year since its creation in 1960 by a group of critics, Austria’s non-competitive major international festival, named Viennale two years later, will once again bring the capital to life. Running from October 20-November 2, the event will give over 95,000 viewers the chance to discover more than 320 features, documentaries and shorts, starting with this evening’s opening film, the widely-acclaimed Cannes prize-winner Le Havre [trailer, film focus] [pictured], by Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki, whose big brother Mika is also in the line-up with his much-awaited documentary Mama Africa [trailer] (the first screening has already sold out).

Among the narrative features in the selection are other titles from the Cannes competition: Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance [trailer], Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist [trailer, film focus], Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope [trailer, film focus], Lars von Trier’s Melancholia [trailer, film focus] and the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid With a Bike [trailer, film focus].

Viennese cinema-goers will also get the chance to discover Still Life by fellow Austrian Sebastian Meise, Adrian Sitaru’s Romanian film Best Intentions, Volcano [trailer] by Iceland’s Rúnar Rúnarsson, Alessandro Comodin’s Summer of Giacomo [trailer], Alps [trailer] by Greece’s Yorgos Lanthimos, Ulrich Köhler’s Berlinale prize-winner Sleeping Sickness [trailer, film focus], Richard Ayoade’s delightful Brit film Submarine [trailer] and The Names of Christ by Catalan helmer Albert Serra.

French cinema is well represented: the Viennale will screen, among others, Almayer’s Folly [trailer], the latest film by Chantal Akerman, who is the subject of a vast retrospective of 40 films; Mathieu Demy’s Americano [trailer]; Valérie Donzelli’s Declaration of War [trailer]; Robert Guédiguian’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro [trailer, film focus]; and Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy [trailer, film focus].