Little, Big, and Far

Jem Cohen brings the same meditative elegance and intellectual curiosity he did to Museum Hours (2012) with his stargazing new feature, again using the cinematic form to patiently interrogate ways of seeing and being. The principal subject of Cohen’s film is an Austrian astronomer named Karl who has been re-evaluating his work and life after turning 70, and who travels to a mountaintop on a Greek island in search of the darkest sky against which to view the cosmos. Yet the real matter of the singular Little, Big, and Far—whose title refers to the three concepts Karl and his physicist wife believe are at the core of their work—is as vast as the universe itself, a reckoning with scientific truth at a moment of humanity’s existential crisis.