Little, Big, and Far – Films

Jem Cohen
Austria, United States | 2024 | 122 min
International Premiere
Languages : English, German
Subtitles : English, French

Karl, a 70-year-old Austrian astronomer, is at a crossroads in life and work. After a conference in Greece, he decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a sky dark enough to reconnect with the stars. There, time slows down, and Little, Big, and Far transports us into an existential and poetic dimension, as vast as the universe itself.

Karl is an Austrian astronomer. He speaks with calm precision about philosophy, his life, and the sky. At 70, as his job comes under threat and his physicist wife has moved to the United States—far from him, closer to their grandchildren—he reflects with his colleague Sarah on the environmental changes reshaping their respective fields. Portrayed by filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland, who is a friend of Jem Cohen, Sarah is a museology consultant. Beyond Karl and through her, the director is able to explore his long-standing fascination with the act of looking, as he did in his previous remarkable film Museum Hours (2012). Dioramas for Sarah, each conveying a dense constellation of questions and concerns; an eclipse for Eleanor, Karl’s wife, captured by Cohen in a dazzlingly beautiful sequence filmed in a parking lot; the night sky above the darkest corner of a Greek island for Karl, where his small, trembling figure is silhouetted, as it encounters an image of the filmmaker’s son. Playfully blurring the line between reality and fiction, Little, Big, and Far becomes a meditation on the existential crisis of humanity itself.
Émilie Bujès

Little, Big, and Far, 2024
Makeshift, 2019
Birth of a Nation, 2019
This Is a History of New York, 2018
Chuck Will's Widow, 2017
Bury Me Not, 2016
World Without End, 2016
On Essex Road, 2016
Counting, 2015
New York Night Scene, 2015
The Film That Buys the Cinema, 2014
Museum Hours, 2012
We Have an Anchor, 2012
Gravity Hill Newsreel Series, 2011-2013
Anne Truitt, Working, 2010
Anecdotal Evidence, 2009
Chinatown Film Project, 2009
Le Bled, 2009
The 8, 2009
Long For the City, 2009
Evening's Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin, 2008
A Tale of Two Cities, 2007
Blessed Are the Dreams of Men, 2006
Building a Broken Mousetrap, 2006
NYC Weights & Measures, 2005
Chain, 2004
New York, 2001
Nice Evening, Transmission Down, 2001
Little Flags, 2000
Benjamin Smoke, 2000
Amber City, 1999
Blood Orange Sky, 1999
Instrument, 1999
Lucky Three: An Elliott Smith Portrait, 1997
Museum: Visiting the Unknown Man, 1997
Lost Book Found, 1996
Black Hole Radio, 1992
Drink Deep, 1991
Glue Man, 1989
Just Hold Still, 1989
Light Years, 1989
A Road in Florida, 1983