Screening Beautiful and Neat Room
Film screening of Beautiful and Neat Room by Maria Petschnig, as part of the exhibition Schwelle, in the main auditorium at Topkino Vienna, followed by a discussion with the artist.
Beautiful and Neat Room, AT, US, 118 MIN, 2025
In order to be able to afford a small Brooklyn apartment, a fiercely artistic woman decides to cohabitate with one seemingly harmless but secretly unhinged roommate after the next and finds herself in some bizarre boundary-pushing experiences, forcing her to question her own norms and the human psyche. A bitingly absurd comedy about the survival as an artist in a big city and the art of navigating everyday life with strangers, that repeatedly veers into a claustrophobic horror film.
More information about the film: https://beautifulandneatroom.com
Maria Petschnig, born 1977 in Klagenfurt, lives and works in Vienna. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, at the Royal College of Art, London, and at Wimbledon School of Art, London, and works as an artist and filmmaker. Her work engages with themes of memory, voyeurism, and intimacy, drawing on a range of media including video art, experimental film, and feature film. Her often psychologically charged and deliberately unsettling works interrogate power relations and the role of the audience as observer. Petschnig's work has been shown internationally, including at MoMA PS1, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Anthology Film Archives in New York, and has been reviewed by renowned outlets such as The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America. In 2021, her first documentary, Uncomfortably Comfortable, was released, following the life of a homeless man in New York. The film premiered at the Duisburg Documentary Film Festival and won the ARTE Documentary Film Award. Her feature film Beautiful and Neat Room (2025), inspired by her own experience living with more than 60 roommates, won the Grand Prix at the Split Film Festival. As she told The New York Times, cohabiting like this was "a way to survive as an artist in New York."