Museum Hours

Plot

When a Vienna museum guard befriends an enigmatic visitor, the grand Kunsthistorisches Museum becomes a crossroads that sparks explorations of their lives, the city, and the ways art reflect and shape the world.

One Vienna winter, Johan, a guard at the grand Kunsthistorisches Museum encounters Anne, a visitor called to Austria for a family medical emergency. Never having been to Austria and with little money, she wanders the city in limbo, taking the museum as her refuge. Johann, initially wary, offers help, and they're drawn into each other's worlds. Their meeting sparks an unexpected series of explorations – of their own lives and the life of the city, and of the way artwork can reflect and shape daily experience. The museum is seen not as an archaic institution of historical artifacts, but as an enigmatic crossroads in which, through the art, a discussion takes place across time with vital implications in the contemporary world. The "conversations" embodied in the museum's collection revolve around the matters that most concern us: death, sex, history, theology, materialism, and so on. It's through the regular lives of the guard and displaced visitor that these heady subjects are brought down to earth and made manifest.

Near the film's end, Johann and Anne are exploring on the fringe of the city when her ill cousin's condition reaches a crisis point.

Cast

Release

Museum Hours premiered at the 2012 Locarno International Film Festival, had its North American premiere within the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, and screened within such U.S. film festivals as South by Southwest and Maryland Film Festival.

The film was acquired for U.S. distribution by The Cinema Guild.