City Child
Austin Lynch / United States & Germany / 2025 / World Premiere / 60 min
An enigmatic and elliptical narrative slowly takes shape in 'City Child', whose architectural form mirrors the geometric structure of a high-rise building rising against a dark sky above Berlin.
It’s winter in Berlin. Two couples meet, and although they exchange only a few glances and even fewer words, the outlines of an obscure plot emerge, as if a complex psychological thriller was unfolding just outside the frame.
Austin Lynch works with basic cinematic elements such as light and shadow, sound and silence, and not least time itself. The result is a hypnotic and atmospheric film that is neither documentary nor fiction, but rather a space that envelops you – just like the darkness of a cinema and the blue twilight that settles over Berlin and its inhabitants.
Every image and sound is composed with an eminent sense of line, shape and space. The elements come together in an audiovisual whole that has found its definitive, almost sculptural form after a careful process of gestation. The director of ‘Gray House’ (CPH:DOX 2017) is back with a haunting work that must be experienced at all costs in the cinema.