Shot on location at Lake Ammersee in August 2026.
Idea, camera, editing, sound: Dunja Bialas
Thanks to RTBF & Jean-Luc Godard
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Pole Position: UNDERDOX takes to the starting grid
John Frankenheimer’s GRAND PRIX kicks off our pre-opening on 3 October
We’re moving into pole position: on 3 October, we present John Frankenheimer’s GRAND PRIX (1966) as the UNDERDOX pre-opening.
Sat 3 Oct, 19:00, WerkstattkinoJust over a week later, we pick up speed again with the second instalment. On 11 October, we present the German premiere of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s re-edit of the classic. Taken apart and put back together! ADGIN PRRX (2026) – 60 years later.
Sun 11 Oct, 17:00, Filmmuseum | Guest: Norbert PfaffenbichlerOne film, one race – and two radically different cinematic experiences!
Combined ticket for both screenings: €14.
Grand Prix © Circus Park At breathtaking speed, four Formula One drivers compete to come out on top in GRAND PRIX (1966), a story of speed thrills, high revs, spectacular images and personal destinies. John Frankenheimer made spectacular use of split-screen techniques in his masterpiece, which won three Oscars. The cameras take us right into the heart of the action. Shot during actual races on the circuits of Monte Carlo, Brands Hatch and Monza. Filmed in Cinerama and Metrocolor.
© Sixpackfilms | Norbert Pfaffenbichler | ADGIN PRRRX 60 years later, the classic enters the workshop of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Norbert Pfaffenbichler: for ADGIN PRRX (2026), he breaks GRAND PRIX down into individual shots and reassembles them according to their length. After a blistering start with a staccato burst of ultra-short images, the original is made to hit the brakes. An impressive essay on time and memory.
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Breaking the Silence
Gedenkinitiative für NS-„Euthanasie”-Opfer
films & talkssonntag 11 okt 16:30 werkstattkino | zu gast: die angehörigen der opfer
In collaboration with the Gedenkinitiative, UNDERDOX invites you to an afternoon of films and discussions with the relatives of victims of Nazi ‘euthanasia’. Our thanks go to Sibylle von Tiedemann of the Gedenkinitiative.
Breaking the Silence (D: Robert Domes)
Around 300,000 people fell victim to the ‘euthanasia’ murders during the Nazi era. One in eight Germans has a relative who was murdered amongst their ancestors. Yet they rarely feature in our culture of remembrance and commemoration.
At the same time, these crimes continue to influence our society to this day in the debate on inclusion and how we treat people with disabilities and marginalised groups. The killings of the sick have left a legacy of trauma in the families in which their fate was kept secret.
Many descendants are setting out to search for clues. They are breaking the silence and telling the stories of their murdered relatives, naming them publicly. ‘Breaking the Silence’ traces the Nazi system of killings of the sick and gives a voice to the relatives who have set out in search of the truth.Film discussion with the victims’ families:
Welcome: Gedenkinitiative (Sibylle von Tiedemann)
Film talk with: Barbara Baum, Margarete Flygt and Josef Heldfollowed by:
Eigentlich wollte ich nicht so lange bleiben (Actually, I Didn´t Want to Stay Long)
(D: Andreas Grützner, Preis der deutschen Filmkritik)
In the late 1970s, Andreas Grützner moved from his village to Hamburg. As a 17-year-old, he found a job at the Alsterdorfer Institutes. The place and the violent treatment of the
people with disabilities housed there proved too much for him, but he stayed and witnessed a social transformation. The belated revelation of a family trauma sets in motion a process of reflection on that period. -
documents & experiments – the UNDERDOX short films
We are presenting the short films that have impressed us in two programmes.
Selected by the Young Curators Benedikt Guntentaler and Timur Özkan.Shorts 1: The B-Side of the Landscape
documents & experiments that are attracting international attention!
monday 12 oct 8 pm werkstattkino
guests: Philipp Hartmann & Rainer Knepperges | hosts: Benedikt Guntentaler & Timur Özkan (young curators)
Electric Birds in the Anthropocene, Kenneth Anger & a love affair with the Wartburg, a journey to Mars, Alfred Edel and the legendary ‘Mehlbeutel’ at a motorway service station.
Films by Ulu Braun, Nicolás Zukerfeld, Julien Rivoire, Markus Mischkowski, Dagie Brundert, Rainer Knepperges,
Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Jan Soldat, Philipp Hartmann.Shorts 2: Munich Orbital
Documents & experiments from the Munich independent film scene!
tuesday 13 oct 8 pm werkstattkino
guests: the filmmakers
A couch potato rocker, the removal of diacritical marks from forms, a lovely trip, a dog, a back garden, the memory of a name.
Films by Okin Cznupolowsky (in memoriam), Claire Angelini, Mina Simendić, Myriam Arleth, Rainer
Knepperges, LUZI, Benedikt Guntentaler, Noah Mrosczok, Amelie Hochhäusler, Dunja Bialas -
The 21 UNDERDOX program – the folder
10 pages of UNDERDOX. Including a Pole Position event on 3 October at the Werkstattkino! We’ll be screening John Frankenheimer’s GRAND PRIX.
Then, on 8 October, things really get going: a full week of UNDERDOX is coming. Featuring a projector performance at Villa Stuck on 11 October and the Pole Position, Part 2: ADGIN PRRX.
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in focus: from brazil with love & Bernardo Zanotta
Our Artist in Focus Bernardo Zanotta is also linked to our country focus From Brazil with Love. We have taken the title from a film by the American avant-garde legend Vivian Ostrovsky, who lived in Brazil for many years. Both are united by their queer filmmaking and their use of the medium of film as an archive and a form of remembrance; both are cosmopolitans of cinema. Bernardo Zanotta grew up in Brazil and went to Amsterdam to study film. Vivian Ostrovsky, born in New York, also grew up in Brazil and studied in Paris. Both express themselves through experimental forms of cinema and, through them, arrive at a deeper form of visual truth – one that lies hidden in the vague interstices of montage and the blurriness of overlapping or out-of-focus images.
Bernardo Zanotta and Vivian Ostrovsky are our guests!
Wild Fruits © Bernardo Zanotta Go to from brazil with love – artist in focus Bernardo Zanotta
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Theme: Remembering
With its theme of ‘Remembering’, UNDERDOX places the evocative and preservative power of the cinematic medium at the heart of its 21st issue.
© Stanley Schtinter | LAST MOVIES Statement by the festival directors on the theme of ‘Remembering’
“We understand this year’s theme, ‘Remembering’, as an invitation to a form of seeing that reaches deep into the past. Through films, we encounter images of what has been. With them, we remember bygone times—also in the sense of a shared culture of remembrance. We recall films we have seen before, making memory itself an aesthetic question.
At the moment of projection, films also open up a biographical space of resonance. They connect with the thoughts and memories we ourselves bring into the cinema, allowing personal recollection and collective history to intertwine.“ – Dunja Bialas and Bernd Brehmer, Heads of UNDERDOXArchivio Aperto (Bologna) – German Premiere
The archive occupies a singular place within cinema’s capacity to preserve and remember. In collaboration with Archivio Aperto in Bologna, the festival organised by Fondazione Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, the 21st edition of UNDERDOX presents Memory & Archive, a programme of contemporary short films selected from previous editions of the festival that creatively reuse archival footage, with a particular focus on private and amateur memories.
Within these fragile moving images, the past is reactivated in the present moment of projection. The screening space, in turn, becomes inhabited by our own memories, as archival images enter into dialogue with personal recollections. – Curated as part of Young People’s Choice.Michal Kosakowski: HOLOFICTION
The Polish-German media artist Michał Kosakowski examines the iconography of the Holocaust in narrative cinema through a montage composed of thousands of fictional after-images. Recurring visual patterns draw on the historical footage recorded at the end of the Second World War, unfolding into a haunting essay on collective memory—on the ways in which the images of the Holocaust have become inscribed in our visual consciousness.
Stanley Schtinter: LAST MOVIES – German Premiere
In his compilation feature LAST MOVIES, the British filmmaker Stanley Schtinter assembles a meticulously researched, idiosyncratic history of cinema through the final films watched by celebrated figures before their deaths. What were the last films seen by Franz Kafka, F. W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, Sergio Leone, John F. Kennedy, Olof Palme, or Kurt Cobain—before memory itself was extinguished forever?
Norbert Pfaffenbichler: ADGIN PRRRX – German Premiere
The Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Norbert Pfaffenbichler dismantles John Frankenheimer’s Formula One classic Grand Prix (1966) into its individual shots before reassembling them according to the strict metric principle of shot duration. The result is a mesmerizing choreography of remembrance in which the relentless repetition of images seems to suspend the forward movement of time. Even as we watch the film unfold, we find ourselves already remembering what we have just seen.
Laura Coppens: SEDIMENTE
Laura Coppen’s grandfather was born during the Second World War, came of age in the GDR, and trained as a physician. Later recruited by the Stasi as an unofficial collaborator, he was abruptly abandoned after refusing to sever ties with his daughter, who had fallen in love with a Spaniard and emigrated to Madrid. “We are the people!”—Christa Wolf’s speech on 4 November 1989 in East Berlin. Super 8 memories of young grandparents: summer holidays, first love, black hair. An intoxicating essay film in which private memory and political history become inseparably intertwined.
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UNDERDOX halftime: Alexander Kluges’ A.I.
We are delighted that Angelika Lepper’s talk on ‘Alexander Kluge’s Artificial Intelligence’ at the UNDERDOX halftime event, attended by just under 100 people, was so well received. She has therefore kindly provided us with her manuscript for publication, for which we are very grateful!
Primitive Diversity. Alexander Kluge and the subjunctive of images
Lecture by Angelika Lepper on 11 June 2026 at the Filmmuseum Munich
© UNDERDOX “Let’s start with a problem: “artificial intelligence.” The term has long since entered everyday language. It appears in almost every funding call, in every cultural section, in every strategy paper. It has become the buzzword of the moment, of the decade, probably of the century. And yet it is — and remains — a rather substantial lie.
In 2021, the media artist and theorist Francis Hunger gave a lecture with the programmatic title “Unhype AI.” His central argument: the term “intelligence” is an inaccurate and illegitimate anthropomorphization. It attributes qualities to the technology that it simply does not possess — and in doing so obscures what it actually does. Hunger proposes alternative terms instead: “automated pattern recognition,” “machine conditioning,” or “weighted network.” These may be less emotionally charged, but they are much closer to what is actually being described.
So what lies behind Hunger’s skepticism?”
[Translated by A.I.]
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UNDERDOX half-time 2026: Alexander Kluge
In memory of the great pioneer of a new film
Halftime program: Alexander Kluge’s Artificial Intelligence
On June 11, 2026, UNDERDOX will dedicate its half-time event at the Filmmuseum Munich (7 p.m.) to the great thinker and adventurer Alexander Kluge, who passed away in Munich on March 25, 2026. We present an evening featuring a talk by Angelika Lepper!
As recently as 2024, Alexander Kluge was a guest at UNDERDOX, where he presented a compiled program together with the Philipinian ARTIST NOT IN FOCUS KHAVN. Alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Kluge was one of the most experimental and inquisitive filmmakers of our time. With KHAVN, he created unseen film correspondences. One of his final cinematic adventures was devoted to artificial intelligence, through which he revisited his own biography from a new perspective.
Regarding PRIMITIVE DIVERSITY (2025), Alexander Kluge writes: “Some films from the period 1895–1929 that I love as a filmmaker are counted as part of the tradition of Primitive Diversity. ‘Primitive’ here is not used as a buzzword, but rather—according to the English usage in the Oxford Dictionary—means ‘original,’ ‘early,’ ‘unsophisticated.’ It is about simple diversity. And today, in 2025, it is as essential as our daily bread.”
© Rapid Eye Movies | Alexander Kluge Currently, one of his last major installations, Ontime/Offtime (2024), is still on view at the Lenbachhaus in Munich. It can be regarded as a summation of Alexander Kluge’s diverse body of work. (As part of Shifting the Silence, on view until January 31, 2027.)
