German Premiere: Cyrill Lachauer – Slack

As part of Berlin Art Week, Video Art at Midnight Productions, together with the Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art in Berlin, and in cooperation with Flipping the Coin, presents the German premiere of Cyrill Lachauer’s first feature film: Slack.

With Slack, 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 known for his images of young “transient people” on freight trains, Lachauer embarks on a journey along the fringes of America, searching for lost fathers, the limits of what can be documented, and a romanticism glorified by pop culture and ostracized by society. At the center is the memory of Brodie’s deceased partner, Mia Justice Smith, aka Slack, whose ashes have become synonymous with an entire generation: shaped by the fentanyl crisis, TikTok aesthetics, and an unconditional desire for freedom beyond traditional narratives. Slack oscillates between artistic documentary, essayistic road movie, and experimental fiction. The camera follows drifters, hobos, and crust punks, people who aren’t living the American dream, but rather subverting it—long since exposed as a farce. The result is a cinematic journey full of contradictions, in which the longing for freedom intertwines with the harshness of social decline.

Produced by Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Co-produced by Videoart at Midnight Productions and
Flipping the Coin, Berlin.

Funded by the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Supported by the Ingvild and Stephan Goetz Art Foundation, Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Jan Fischer, Ulrich and Nathan Köstlin, Scumeck Sabottka.

Cyrill Lachauer (*1979) lives and works in Berlin and travels. His works blend photography, film, and text. Lachauer seeks forms and possibilities of speaking “with” rather than “about” the narrative landscapes he travels through, as he calls them. After studying directing, ethnology, and art in Munich and Berlin, his work was initially preceded by complex ethnological questions. However, Lachauer gradually developed a radically subjective ethnography based on his own realities and experiences. His works have been shown at the Goetz Collection, Haus der Kunst in Munich (2020), the Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art in Berlin (2017), and the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich (2015).

German Premiere
Cyrill Lachauer – Slack
Saturday, Sep 13, 2025, 16:00 | 4 p.m.

Babylon Cinema
Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30
10178 Berlin

Artist Talk
Cyrill Lachauer and Mike Brodie
Sunday, Sep 14, 2025, 17:00 | 5 p.m.

IBB Video Raum
Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art
Alte Jakobstr. 124-128
10969 Berlin