11.12.24, 20:30, Ticket of No Return (1979)

In Ticket of No Return, we follow an unnamed woman with a very special goal: the ultimate surrender to the intoxication of drink and decadence. In this magisterial but wacky masterpiece, an unnamed anti-heroine takes a ‘single ticket’ to Berlin — and to the deep caverns of the bottle. Ulrike Ottinger serves up a wry but wonderful cocktail of isolation and irony, in which our main character indulges in total autonomy, or perhaps just total dislocation. In every scene, decadence and drunkenness loom as silent witnesses of an existence that is abandoning its foundations — and at the same time feeding our curiosity.

This radical perspective on escapism transforms 1970s Berlin into a theatre for the fascination with letting go, in which our anti-heroine balances between freedom and alienation. Ticket of No Return is a cinematic trip, both wry and irresistible, that says as much about ourselves as it does about the tragic characters on screen. An artful search for the line between resistance and being lost.

Restored by Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst.