Vancouver Premiere

“Wondrous [and] expansive … A reminder to seize solitude amid the bustle of everyday existence, to be quiet and still, to look up and consider the universe.”

Isaac Feldberg, RogerEbert.com

A spiritual cousin to his 2012 masterpiece Museum Hours, the latest from New York-based filmmaker Jem Cohen is at once an engrossing guided tour across the expanding universe and a ruminative portrait of an astronomer at an existential crossroads. Karl (Franz Schwartz), an Austrian stargazer for whom free jazz serves as blueprint to the cosmos, is 70 and uncertain if his consultant job at a museum will hold. Feeling unmoored in an anthropogenic era, where miraculous advances in deep-space observation are counterbalanced with extinction-level crises at home, he prolongs a stay in Greece to contemplate the stars. Drawing its title from the three basic concepts of Karl’s work, Little, Big, and Far conveys masterclass ideas by way of long-distance exchanges between the protagonist, his physicist wife (filmmaker Leslie Thornton), and a former grad student. Cohen pinpoints the personal in the profound, delivering a generous, thought-provoking film that contemplates constellations celestial and human alike.

In German and English with English subtitles

“Moments of sheer beauty … Cohen suggests that modern cinema, unshackled from genre, is more powerful than we may give it credit for. Cohen’s work is porous, holding room for all these possibilities and more.”

Conor Williams, Reverse Shot

“Cohen casts out a wide net, pulling the astronomical towards the ephemeral, draping them around each other with the implicit conviction that our lives are connected to the cosmos. It is democratic cinema, equally dedicated to physicists and street-corner astronomers. The sky still belongs to all of us, even as contemporary society has marred our ability to see its lights.”

Cici Peng, Sight and Sound
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