As part of Berlin Art Week, the Berlinische Galerie, together with Videoart at Midnight Productions and in cooperation with Flipping the Coin, presents the German premiere of Cyrill Lachauer’s first feature film: Slack.
Image above: Cyrill Lachauer, Slack, 2025, film still, © Cyrill Lachauer, Courtesy Cyrill Lachauer.
With Slack (2025, 60 min.), artist and filmmaker Cyrill Lachauer presents a raw yet poetic search for clues across the United States. Together with legendary US photographer Mike Brodie, who became famous for his photographs of young “transient people” on freight trains, Lachauer embarks on a journey along the margins of America in search of lost fathers, the limits of what can be documented, and a romanticism that has been romanticized by pop culture and ostracized by society. At the center is the memory of Brodie’s late partner Mia Justice Smith, alias Slack, whose ashes become synonymous with an entire generation: marked by the fentanyl crisis, TikTok aesthetics, and an unconditional desire for freedom beyond classic narratives.
Slack oscillates between artistic documentary, essayistic road movie, and experimental fiction. The camera follows drifters, hobos, and crust punks—people who do not live the American dream but instead subvert it, having long since recognized it as a farce. The result is a cinematic trip full of contradictions, in which the longing for freedom intersects with the harshness of social decline.
About the artist
Cyrill Lachauer (*1979) lives and works in Berlin and while traveling. His works combine photography, film, and text. Lachauer seeks forms and possibilities to speak “with” rather than “about” the narrative landscapes he encounters on his travels, as he calls them. After studying film directing, ethnology, and art in Munich and Berlin, his early work focused on complex ethnological questions.
Gradually, however, Lachauer developed a radically subjective ethnography based on his own reality and experiences. His works have been exhibited in the Goetz Collection, Haus der Kunst in Munich (2020), the Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst in Berlin (2017), and the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich (2015).
WHEN?
German premiere at Babylon Berlin: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 4 p.m.
Artist talk with Cyrill Lachauer and Mike Brodie: Sunday, September 14, 2025, 5 p.m.
WHERE?
German premiere:
Babylon Kino
Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30
10178 Berlin
Artist talk:
IBB Videoraum Berlinische Galerie
Alte Jakobstr. 124-128
10969 Berlin
COSTS?
Admission: EUR 10
Reduced: EUR 6
