Kill the Jockey. Open-Air-Kino und Gespräch. Box Office Around The World 2025

In the organizer's words:

On two weekends in August, the Schlüterhof becomes a meeting place for film enthusiasts from all over the world - with summery drinks and snacks. The open-air festival presents six current cinema productions that are box office hits in their countries of origin but have not yet been shown on the big screen in Germany. Before the screenings, we invite you to thematic spotlights to get you in the mood - with prominent guests!

The release of every major film production is accompanied by great anxiety and guesswork: will the audience buy into the story told, the star constellation and the film language and flock to the cinema in droves?

Box Office Around The World is a film festival that aims to unravel this mystery from the audience's perspective. Unlike Hollywood productions, which are designed for the global market, "box office hits" from other regions of the world often provide surprising insights into what moves people in Lagos, Buenos Aires or Bangkok. The Schlüterhof is located in the heart of Berlin - and surrounded by collections from many cultures around the world.

Over two weekends in August, the Box Office Around the World festival presents six current cinema productions that are audience successes and box office hits in their countries of origin, but have not yet been shown on the big screen in Germany.

Representatives of the Berlin communities from Thailand, Argentina, Nigeria, Vietnam, Brazil and India have selected the films together with curator Dorothee Wenner and developed an accompanying program: Before the open-air screenings, we will shine a thematic spotlight on each film with a line-up of stars.

Curator of the film program

Dorothee Wenner is a freelance filmmaker, curator and author based in Berlin.

Since 1990 she has worked in various positions for the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, currently as the festival's delegate for the Sub-Saharan Africa region. She has been a member of the board and jury of the African Movie Academy Awards in Lagos since its inception in 2005. Her latest work as a filmmaker is the web series Kinshasa Collection. Since 2020 she has been working as a consultant for film/cinema at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and initiated the Cinema Spaces Network.

Dorothee Wenner curated the Box Office Around The World 2025 festival for the third time with representatives from the communities.

Kill the Jockey - Luis Ortega / Argentina 2024 / 96 min. / Thriller

What's happening in the mind of an extremely successful jockey who has to get high on alcohol and various drugs before every race? When he causes the long-feared accident on the track, he is admitted to hospital with a serious head injury, from which he flees in his roommate's fur coat. He hopes to escape his pursuers and find his pregnant girlfriend, the mysterious Abril, also a jockey. Is this cool Remo, former favorite jockey and foster child of an underworld king, actually still alive - or are the things he sees and experiences on the streets of Buenos Aires figments of his imagination? In the end, the scales in the pharmacy don't even tip the scales when Remo tries to weigh himself.

This film is a visual intoxication, an adventure, a gender-fluid love story with musical interludes. The levels of time and reality switch effortlessly, not least thanks to the camera work, which you have to experience on the big screen to feel the crazy pace on the racing horses and not miss any details of the underworld king's taciturn string-pulling.

Program

20:00: Talk with Fabian Casas (writer & screenwriter, Buenos Aires), Dorothee Wenner & Julieta Zarankin (curators). In English and Spanish

21:00 Film screening

Participants

Fabián Casas was born in 1965 in the Boedo district of Buenos Aires. His books include Los Lemmings y otros (short stories, 2005, 2017), Ocio (novel, 2006, 2007), Ensayos bonsái (2007), Horla City y otros. All the poems 1990-2010 (2010), Titans of the Coconut (novel, 2015), Bringing Home All Over Again. All the essays (2016), The Tolstoy Supremacy (Essays, 2013), Last Poems on Prozac (2019) and Vegetable Wrapping Paper (2020).

He was the screenwriter of the film Jauja (2014), directed by Lisandro Alonso and starring Viggo Mortensen, which received critical and audience acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival, and co-wrote Kill the Jockey (2024).

In 2007, he received the prestigious Anna Seghers Prize in Germany, and in 2011 he was selected by the Guadalajara International Book Fair as one of the authors to inherit the legacy of the great writers.

Julieta Zarankin was born in Buenos Aires and has lived permanently in Berlin since 2009. After graduating from the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, she worked in various areas of film promotion, distribution and production, including festivals such as BAFICI and Mar del Plata, production companies such as Black Forest Films and Sommerhaus Filmproduktion, and distributors such as Santa Cine and Wolf Kino, where she was part of the founding team. In 2021, she became part of the Berlinale Co-Production Market team, where she continues to work. In 2014, she founded INVASION, the first Argentinian film and culture festival in Berlin, which she has directed ever since. Together with Dorothee Wenner, she curates the Argentinian section of Box Office Around the World at the Humboldt Forum.

Further information:

- 10 EUR, reduced 5 EUR

- FSK 18

- Schlüterhof Entrance: Portal 5

- Spanish with English subtitles

- Belongs to: Box Office Around The World 2025