ART CINEMA AWARD AT LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2012 Anne (played heartbreakingly close to a detached emotional register by the Canadian artist/chanteuse Mary Margaret O’Hara) leaves her life in Montreal to visit a relative in hospital in Vienna. She spends her time navigating the sparsely occupied streets of the wintry city and winds up where many tourists dwell, in the rich, cavernous rooms of the Kunsthistoriches Art Museum. There she encounters Johann (a hauntingly understated Bobby Sommer), a museum guard and hyper-observant repository of information. They juggle work and off hours to get time together, and their conversations—about life, family and art—form the heartbeat of the piece. What sounds like a traditional narrative or brief encounter plotline is anything but that in the hands of the resolutely huma- nistic experimental filmmaker Jem Cohen (Chain, Benjamin Smoke), whose hybrid approach to “living cinema” has never been so fully realized. The film highlights a great institution’s collection in macro fashion, the camera lovingly and critically tracing the iconography of classic paintings while recording and registering the comments and gazes of observers. — Madeleine Molyneaux