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A journey through German cinemascape.
Philipp Hartmann made a film, toured the German cinema scene with it and made that into
a film too: an overview of an eclectic mix of cinemas all run by cinephiles. Shared love
entails shared suffering: every Kino is under threat.
Can something be a hobby if it’s your job? Can something be work if you love it so much?
These are the questions a cinema owner asks himself out loud in this documentary. In 66
Kinos, enthusiastic staff members at a range of cinemas answer these rhetorical questions
affirmatively. We pass popcorn machines and projection rooms on our way to the screen.
There is a downside. Turnover from food and drinks is crucial for earnings. Should one
switch from 'real' 35mm to digital? Should some of the cinema’s halls be reserved for
Hollywood blockbusters? And even then, this might not be enough. Will going to the
cinema be the same in a decade’s time? Or does its structure need to be fundamentally
redefined? It’s a conundrum, but the small entrepreneur’s hope prevails. (International
Filmfestival Rotterdam 2017)
This film could have simply offered the recount of an elderly director’s amusing and
narcissistic journey as he shows his latest film in 66 German movie theaters; however, it
ends up being a remarkable and kind essay on a practice at risk of extinction (or in an outand-
out mutation process). It is not incidental that 66 KINOS opens in an old, strippeddown
abbey turned into a movie theatre and closes with the words of an art curator on the
relation between cinema and art installations – while cinema has captured time, time also
captured cinema and transformed its very nature. At each cinema and in each city visited
by Hartmann, he gathers evidence of it. In face of the advent of an overbearing digital
ontology, Hartmann witnesses the last traces of an era without prophesying the
apocalypse – after all, he records in HD – but also without stopping to ask questions about
the future of cinema as a collective sensory experience. (Roger Koza)
A journey through German cinemascape.
Philipp Hartmann made a film, toured the German cinema scene with it and made that into
a film too: an overview of an eclectic mix of cinemas all run by cinephiles. Shared love
entails shared suffering: every Kino is under threat.
Can something be a hobby if it’s your job? Can something be work if you love it so much?
These are the questions a cinema owner asks himself out loud in this documentary. In 66
Kinos, enthusiastic staff members at a range of cinemas answer these rhetorical questions
affirmatively. We pass popcorn machines and projection rooms on our way to the screen.
There is a downside. Turnover from food and drinks is crucial for earnings. Should one
switch from 'real' 35mm to digital? Should some of the cinema’s halls be reserved for
Hollywood blockbusters? And even then, this might not be enough. Will going to the
cinema be the same in a decade’s time? Or does its structure need to be fundamentally
redefined? It’s a conundrum, but the small entrepreneur’s hope prevails. (International
Filmfestival Rotterdam 2017)
This film could have simply offered the recount of an elderly director’s amusing and
narcissistic journey as he shows his latest film in 66 German movie theaters; however, it
ends up being a remarkable and kind essay on a practice at risk of extinction (or in an outand-
out mutation process). It is not incidental that 66 KINOS opens in an old, strippeddown
abbey turned into a movie theatre and closes with the words of an art curator on the
relation between cinema and art installations – while cinema has captured time, time also
captured cinema and transformed its very nature. At each cinema and in each city visited
by Hartmann, he gathers evidence of it. In face of the advent of an overbearing digital
ontology, Hartmann witnesses the last traces of an era without prophesying the
apocalypse – after all, he records in HD – but also without stopping to ask questions about
the future of cinema as a collective sensory experience. (Roger Koza)
Philipp Hartmann made a film, toured the German cinema scene with it and made that into
a film too: an overview of an eclectic mix of cinemas all run by cinephiles. Shared love
entails shared suffering: every Kino is under threat.
Can something be a hobby if it’s your job? Can something be work if you love it so much?
These are the questions a cinema owner asks himself out loud in this documentary. In 66
Kinos, enthusiastic staff members at a range of cinemas answer these rhetorical questions
affirmatively. We pass popcorn machines and projection rooms on our way to the screen.
There is a downside. Turnover from food and drinks is crucial for earnings. Should one
switch from 'real' 35mm to digital? Should some of the cinema’s halls be reserved for
Hollywood blockbusters? And even then, this might not be enough. Will going to the
cinema be the same in a decade’s time? Or does its structure need to be fundamentally
redefined? It’s a conundrum, but the small entrepreneur’s hope prevails. (International
Filmfestival Rotterdam 2017)
This film could have simply offered the recount of an elderly director’s amusing and
narcissistic journey as he shows his latest film in 66 German movie theaters; however, it
ends up being a remarkable and kind essay on a practice at risk of extinction (or in an outand-
out mutation process). It is not incidental that 66 KINOS opens in an old, strippeddown
abbey turned into a movie theatre and closes with the words of an art curator on the
relation between cinema and art installations – while cinema has captured time, time also
captured cinema and transformed its very nature. At each cinema and in each city visited
by Hartmann, he gathers evidence of it. In face of the advent of an overbearing digital
ontology, Hartmann witnesses the last traces of an era without prophesying the
apocalypse – after all, he records in HD – but also without stopping to ask questions about
the future of cinema as a collective sensory experience. (Roger Koza)
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