| And in the Middle | A Wirtshaus |

EVERYDAY LIFE AND STATE OF EMERGENCY. WHERE THE VILLAGE COMES TOGETHER.
by Daniela-Katrin Strobl, Michael Zeindlinger

2268, Früher von Gloria Gammer © Philip Jestaedt

And in the Middle is Diagonale’s new annual film and discussion series engaging with locations beyond urban centers—rural spaces in which social life is visible, negotiable, and at the same time, fragile. Each year, a concrete location is chosen as starting point, as resonance space for issues of identity, change, and community in the countryside. In coming years, focus will be on further settings at the center.  By juxtaposing documentary, essay, and fictional works, a cinematic plexus of locations should arise connecting rural topographies with a cinema of memory, observation, and storytelling. A film series about spaces and places as subjects that shape and challenge how we live together. A new place each year, different conversations each time.

At the center for this first edition is a place that epitomizes the social fabric of rural life: the inn. Whether village inn, church inn, or country guesthouse, it is both meeting point and stage—for the get-together of regulars and club gatherings, for weddings and funerals, for everyday life and exceptional situations. A place where people get close and order is maintained or rejected. From the often-condescending urban perspective of village life, the inn oscillates between idealized festivity and dreariness. Politics and media instrumentalize the term Stammtisch, which refers to the table of regulars, while in many places, real inns are disappearing, making them both root and symptom at once: when there’s no vibrant village center, the innkeepers disappear, when the innkeepers disappear, the village center disappears.

The films in this series approach the inn as a social space: as a site of negotiation and exchange, as a hub for news, opinions, and power. They show the inn as both an open and exclusionary space—familiar, contested, and fragile. A site where questions of community, belonging, and change condense in an exemplary way; where who speaks, who serves, and who is absent become visible.

Curated by Daniela-Katrin Strobl, Michael Zeindlinger