Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event is cancelled until further notice.
Canadian premiere with filmmaker in attendance
Tuesday, March 17, 2020. This event is free and open to the public
First come, first seated. Doors at 6:15 p.m. Screening at 6:30 p.m. with Q&A to follow
The Cinematheque, 1131 Howe Street
Haunted by his father’s portrait of his grandparents who vanished in the Holocaust, Joseph Koerner returns to Vienna to solve their mystery.
With his father’s painting as his guide, Koerner visits historians, architects, and artists who conjure Vienna’s passion for homemaking—the apartments, bars, galleries, and sanatoria that are the triumphs of modern interior design. He enters interiors created by Gustav Klimt and Sigmund Freud that bring to light the dark recesses of the soul.
Completed eighty years after the Anschluss, The Burning Child is a moving, visually stunning journey through Vienna’s urban and psychic interior to a buried past, when dreams of home became, for a city’s most ardent homemakers, an unimaginable nightmare.
“We enter interiors—of Viennese homes, of people’s dreams and aspirations—to confront how we construct identity and meaning. A remarkable film.” —Yo-Yo Ma
The screening is followed by a Q&A and conversation and between Joseph Leo Koerner and Catherine Soussloff, Professor; Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at UBC.
Joseph Leo Koerner is the Thomas Professor of History of Art and Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is author, most recently, of Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life.
The Burning Child
Country of Origin: USA
Year: 2019
Running Time: 112 mins
Format: DCP
Language: In English, German with English subtitles
Credits: Directed by Joseph Leo Koerner. Directed by Christian D. Bruun. Produced by Joseph Leo Koerner, Christian D. Bruun, Bo-Mi Choi. Edited by Sabine Krayenbühl. Written by Joseph Leo Koerner. Cinematography: Christian D. Bruun. Original Score: Anthony Cheung. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Harvard University.
