* (Stern)

A film without answers, but with as many questions as there are stars in the sky: Austrian structuralist Johann Lurf has chosen a daring, infinitely expanding subject for his feature film debut: the stars of cinema. However, these are not movie stars, but the stars in the night sky, bright pinpricks in the darkness, which he has excerpted from films - beginning with the dawn of cinema up to the present day - as part of a project that is to be expanded annually.

These stellar examples, taken from their cinematic context with sound intact - whether ambient hums, powerful orchestral scores, meticulous explanations or dreamy speculations - are magical fields of a darkness speckled with possibilities. Lurf's jazzy montage balances calm concentration and nervous image fluctuations, based on the methodical approach of adopting the duration, image and sound track of each excerpt.

The audience is thus sent on a journey through the tonalities of threat and promise that the cosmos emits. Because this is a subject that is difficult or impossible to record accurately on film, we repeatedly encounter the various interpretations of the starry night by matte artists (scenery painters) and special effects wizards, sometimes very calmly, sometimes in frenzied movement through space or into it, on glowing white nebulae, distant winking dots and in between the

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