Skip to main content
Dying film image; people at a table in a restaurant

Dying

Sterben

Showcase

This event has passed

North American Premiere

With death looming for both elders of the Lunies clan, their estranged children are forced to meet once more, while dealing with their own tumultuous dramas. Tom (Lars Eidinger), a conductor in his early forties, is working on a composition called “Dying,” while also acting as the surrogate father of his ex-girlfriend’s child. Meanwhile, his sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) begins a destructive affair with a married man. As their lives converge, age-old enmities rise to the surface.

In this epic, three-hour saga by German director Matthias Glasner, Tolstoy’s maxim that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” gets further confirmation. Divided into discrete chapters, the film is a tense drama of impressive scale and ambition. By turns morbid, darkly comic, and unexpectedly invigorating, it is a film about the inescapable vicissitudes of family: those people we can’t seem to live with, but also can’t seem to do without.

 

Silver Bear for Best Screenplay, Berlin 2024

 

Managers to be exceedingly funny, often in some of its darkest moments, as well as expectedly sad.

Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter

Director
Cast

Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangenberg, Ronald Zehrfeld, Robert Gwisdek, Anna Bederke

Credits
Country of Origin

Germany

Year

2024

Language

In German with English subtitles

Film Contact
18+

At International Village

19+

At Fifth Avenue

180 min
Art, Music & Photography Award Winners Drama Family Relations
Port au Prince Film & Kultur Produktion GmbH, Schwarzweiss Filmproduktion GmbH, Senator Film Produktion GmbH, ZDF

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits & Director

Producer

Jan Krüger, Ulf Israel, Matthias Glasner

Screenwriter

Matthias Glasner

Cinematography

Jakub Bejnarowicz

Editor

Heike Gnida

Production Design

Tamo Kunz

Original Music

Lorenz Dangel

Matthias Glasner headshot; Dying director

Matthias Glasner

Matthias Glasner was born in Hamburg in 1965. In the 90s, he made the hipster trilogy Die Mediocren (1995), Sexy Sadie (1996), and Fandango (2000), all of which premiered at the Berlinale. This was followed by the films Der Freie Wille (2006), This is Love (2009), and Gnade (2011). Glasner has directed several television series including KDD – Kriminaldauerdienst (Grimme Prize and German Television Prize), Blochin – Die Lebenden und die Toten, Landgericht (Grimme Prize), and season two of Das Boot.

Filmography: Die Mediocren (1995); Sexy Sadie (1996); Fandango (2000); Der Freie Wille (2006); This is Love (2009); Gnade (2011)

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

21st Century Classics Audience Choice: Parasite

Dir. Bong Joon-ho
132 min

South Korean master filmmaker Bong Joon-ho delivers an unpredictable comic suspense thriller with his Palme d'Or and Academy Award-winning film, Parasite.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

School of Rock

Dir. Richard Linklater
108 min

With not one, but two new Richard Linklater movies at VIFF this year (Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon), we thought it would be fun to revisit a choice cut from his rich back catalogue: the best Black and White movie ever made, School of Rock.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Boyhood

Dir. Richard Linklater
165 min

A dozen years in the making, Richard Linklater's masterpiece chronicles the evolution of a boy into a young man, from six to 18. It is the ultimate coming-of-age movie, and one of the most audacious cinematic feats of the decade.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

There Will Be Blood

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
158 min

Paul Thomas Anderson's lacerating epic about the birth of the oil age: Daniel Day-Lewis is extraordinary as the prospector entirely consumed with his own enterprise, a Trumpian figure of naked self-assertion; Paul Dano the evangelist who may be his nemesis.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Godland

Dir. Hlynur Pálmason
143 min

In the late 19th century, a Danish Lutheran priest is dispatched to a far corner of Iceland where a devout farmer has seen fit to build a church. The physical journey is arduous. His spiritual journey, more taxing still.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

The Balconettes

Dir. Noémie Merlant
105 min

In this flamboyant black comedy set in Marseille during a heatwave, writer-director-star Noémie Merlant and her two besties have to cover up the unpleasant evidence of a disastrous night partying with the hunk across the way.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre