Screening | Slack by Cyrill Lachauer with Mike Brodie | MPF

Join us for the exclusive screening of Slack (2025), a film by Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Cyrill Lachauer, featuring the legendary American photographer Mike Brodie. This one-night-only screening at Curzon Soho is followed by a special in-person conversation with both artists.

About the Film:

In Slack (2025, 61 min.), director Cyrill Lachauer travels with American photographer Mike Brodie in freight trains across the United States in search of lost fathers, the boundaries of image-making, and an unattainable romance celebrated by pop culture but simultaneously rejected by society.The focus lays on the memory of Brodie’s late partner Mia Justice Smith alias Slack whose ashes have come to symbolize a generation scarred by the fentanyl crisis, shaped by post-punk, TikTok and an unrelenting desire for freedom. Slack oscillates between artistic documentary and essay film, between feature and experimental film. It describes the life and travels of Mike Brodie and his friends: drifters, hobos and crust punks. They exist on the fringes of legality. They live the ultimate inversion of the much-vaunted American dream, the promise of social advancement accessible to all. Ancient heroes wander the abysses of the so-called “first world”

About Cyrill Lachauer:

Cyrill Lachauer is a Berlin-based filmmaker and artist known for his immersive, field-based storytelling that blends photography, film, and text. With academic roots in directing, ethnology, and art, his work explores the intersections of identity, memory, and place. Lachauer’s distinctive approach, has earned him prestigious accolades, including the Villa Aurora Prize (2015) and the Pollock-KrasnerPrize (2021). His work has been exhibited at major institutions such as Haus der Kunst and Berlinische Galerie.

About Mike Brodie:

Mike Brodie, born in 1985 in Arizona, is a self-taught American photographer best known for his raw, intimate portraits of transient youth culture. Nicknamed “The Polaroid Kidd,” Brodie began photographing in 2004 while freighthopping across the U.S., capturing the lives of train-hoppers, punks, and drifters. His acclaimed series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity and Tones of Dirt and Bone earned him the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers in 2008. Though he later left photography to become a diesel mechanic, Brodie’s brief but powerful photographic career left a lasting mark on contemporary American documentary photography. Here I would write that Mike just returned to the art world with his new photo book "Failing".

Director's Note:

Cyrill Lachauer (*1979) lives and works in Berlin as well as on his travels. His works are the result of long journeys and field-works. Lachauer seeks forms and possibilities to speak “with” and not “about” the narrative landscapes he travels through, as he calls them. He immerses himself in his surroundings and their places and transforms his experiences as fragmentary stories in photography, film and text. After studying directing, ethnology and art in Munich and Berlin, complex ethnological questions often stood at the beginning of Lachauer’s work. Later, Lachauer turned away from ethnological questions and towards a radically subjective ethnography committed to his own realities of life.