Ticket of No Return
Ulrike Ottinger, 1979, 109minsScreening at Atlas Cinema, SW9 7FA
April 2025
In April 2025, I hosted a screening of Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return (Bildnis einer Trinkerin) at Atlas Cinema in Loughborough Junction, a community cinema initiative. Below is a brief synopsis of the film.
An unnamed woman (played by Tabea Blumenschein) arrives in Berlin with plans to live out the rest of her days as a drunkard in Ticket of No Return (Bildnis einer Trinkerin). The first instalment of Ulrike Ottinger's experimental Berlin Trilogy, this film is a dazzling tour through 1970's Berlin's underworld and an overlooked queer classic of New German Cinema.
"Ticket of No Return (1979), a dazzlingly strange odyssey through the streets of Berlin by the German avant-garde filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, is drawn to a different kind of wandering, one that is guided by an unabashed indulgence in frivolity, self-destruction and aimlessness."
- Phuong Le, Sight and Sound, September 2022
An unnamed woman (played by Tabea Blumenschein) arrives in Berlin with plans to live out the rest of her days as a drunkard in Ticket of No Return (Bildnis einer Trinkerin). The first instalment of Ulrike Ottinger's experimental Berlin Trilogy, this film is a dazzling tour through 1970's Berlin's underworld and an overlooked queer classic of New German Cinema.
"Ticket of No Return (1979), a dazzlingly strange odyssey through the streets of Berlin by the German avant-garde filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, is drawn to a different kind of wandering, one that is guided by an unabashed indulgence in frivolity, self-destruction and aimlessness."
- Phuong Le, Sight and Sound, September 2022