Co-presented with Telescope Film

KINO! Film Salon is a monthly online club to discuss films from Germany.
 
How it works: Each month we choose a German film currently available to stream on U.S. platforms, watch it independently, and come together for a hosted conversation with other fans of German cinema.

For our July session, we’re celebrating spooky season early with Tilman Singer’s horror thriller Cuckoo. Hunter Schaefer stars as Gretchen, a seventeen-year-old who is dreading her move to an isolated Alpine resort town with her newly widowed father and his new family. There, she is pulled into a conspiracy of bizarre experiments led by the proprietor of a local hotel. KINO! Film Salon host Jim Kolmar calls Cuckoo “a shockingly audacious, enigmatic marvel (…) Despite wielding some familiar genre tropes, Cuckoo quickly reveals itself as something far more complex, deploying a brace of visual and sonic devices, unpredictable plotting, and a bizarre tone that gives the sense of multiple stories and ideas refracted through a single lens. Thanks to a sterling cast, and plenty of disturbing moments and scares, Cuckoo is a striking entry in the recent wave of elevated horror filmmaking.”

Cuckoo celebrated its world premiere at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival. It won several awards, including the Silver Raven in the International Competition at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival and German Film Critics’ Award for Best Cinematography.

Hosted by Jim Kolmar

Jim programs for SXSW and Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, and was a founding committee member of Festival Internacional de Cine Tulum (FICTU). He has participated in numerous international festival juries, panels, and committees.

KINO!Film Salon is a production of Telescope Film, in partnership with the German Film Office.

Cuckoo
Dir. Tilman Singer
Germany, 2024
102 minutes
With Hunter Schaefer, Marton Csokas, Dan Stevens