MUSEUM HOURS

"Effectively applies Cohen's existing strengths to a familiar scenario and rejuvenates it by delivering a powerfully contemplative look at the transformative ability of all art." - Indiewire

Celebrated writer/director Jem Cohen (Chain, MIFF 2005) sets his first fiction feature in Vienna's grand Kunsthistoriches Art Museum, where the extraordinary collection of Brueghels, Rembrandts and Rubens starts a friendship between Anne (influential singer/artist Mary Margaret O'Hara), an enigmatic foreigner in town waiting for her comatose cousin to wake, and museum guard Johann.

The pair's charming interactions, firstly over art and then out and about in the wintry streets of the city, are composed with a painterly eye. Full of detail and quietly intense, Museum Hours rewards on many levels: in its depiction of an unexpected relationship; as a portrait of Vienna; as a thoughtful observation on art and the act of viewing, and on the interplay between art history and personal experience.

"With its picturesque reframing of what we consider art, and its re-contextualizing of time-honored masterpieces, Museum Hours accomplished what every film - and film festival - should: Send audiences out of their cinematic bubble with fresh eyes and invigorated ways of seeing the world around them." - Washington Post

D/S Jem Cohen P Paolo Calamita, Jem Cohen, Gabriele Kranzelbinder WS KGP L English, German w/English subtitles TD DCP/2012