Uncategorized
How a complete unknown created one of the most iconic music events of the 1970’s
“I’ve always been a stranger,” Ido Fluk told me when I met him in a near-empty conference room in a sleek, Nordic-designed hotel in Berlin this past February. It was the afternoon after the Berlin Film Festival’s world premiere of the Israeli director’s German-language film, Köln 75, a kinetic behind-the-scenes look at Keith Jarrett’s famous live album, The Köln Concert. Jarrett improvised the hour-long set at the Cologne Opera House on Jan. 24, 1975, on a substandard piano — a beat-up baby grand rehearsal piano instead of the 10-foot-long Bösendorfer Imperial he’d been promised.
The film has grossed over a million dollars at the German box office — no mean feat for a domestic production — and was nominated for four Lola awards (Germany’s version of the Oscars) including Best Picture.
Fluk, 40ish, with tousled hair and a thick mustache, stubble and round, dark-framed glasses, had a peripatetic upbringing. Born in Tel Aviv, he was raised both there and in Paris, where his family relocated for five years during his childhood. Just shy of 20, he moved to New York City to study at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts.
He returned to Israel to shoot his first feature film, Never Too Late (2011) about a young Israeli man who comes home after eight years in South America and takes a road trip in his 1985 Volvo through the country he left behind. It holds the unusual distinction of being the first crowd-funded Israeli film and won the main prize at the Fribourg Film Festival. Fluk shot his next film, The Ticket (2016), about a blind man who regains his vision, in Kingston, New York. Köln 75 was filmed largely on location in Cologne.
“I’ve always been, like, moving around. So for me, it’s very natural to go to a new country to make a film,” said Fluk. “I also think it’s the story of cinema a little bit these days where art house cinema in the States is kind of a dying breed. You see more and more filmmakers from the U.S. traveling to Europe.”
“And, you know,” he added, “it’s also kind of the story of Keith Jarrett in the 70s, which is that jazz musicians were losing their audiences in the States, and they started coming to Europe, because in Europe they still found an eager audience for their work. So I could identify with that, in a way.”
Fluk was wearing a black T-shirt for the British punk rock band Idles that showed a man in a balaclava posing with a birthday cake. The image was captioned, “JOY STILL AN ACT OF RESISTANCE.” Fluk has a musical background. When he moved to New York, he played bass for “all these punk bands that never made it.” One band that sort of did was Elephant Parade, a lo-fi indie outfit that he formed with his now-partner, Estelle Baruch. They played legendary venues and festivals like CBGB and South by Southwest and even opened for Beirut.
“I’m not a good musician by any means,” he said, “but it helps you understand just how difficult what Jarrett is doing. It’s such a feat, what this man was doing in the 70s, which means driving in this tiny car, and every night showing up at a new city and playing a new thing that nobody’s ever heard before. He doesn’t think about it. He just starts playing.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, the respect that Fluk has for Jarrett (a reclusive artist, now 80, who had nothing to do with the film), the director did not set out to make a conventional biopic. Instead, the narrative and emotional center of the film, which Fluk also wrote, is Vera Brandes, the 18-year-old self-made concert promoter who, 50 years ago, signed Jarrett for the gig, sold out the venue, and convinced the reluctant pianist to perform on a subpar keyboard for the 1400-strong crowd that packed into the Cologne Opera House for the 11:30 pm concert. (The late hour was due to a performance of Alban Berg’s Lulu earlier that evening, a wonderfully strange detail that makes it into the film).
“There are a lot of movies about music that tell you the same story. It’s about the artist. It’s about his rise. There’s some complication, then there’s a comeback, there’s a big show at the end. And here was a story about the woman behind the scenes. It wasn’t a story about the artist so much as about the promoter and the invisible people behind the artist. I thought that was really interesting and fresh,” Fluk said. At the start of the shoot, Fluk invited Brandes, now 69, to visit the set, an event that he recalled as inspiring for him and the film’s team.
“She’s like a punk rock goddess from the 70s who, like, changed the world and never got a proper thank you. This was an opportunity to shine a light on her, because however good Keith Jarrett is, no Vera Brandes, no ‘Cologne Concert.’ If Keith Jarrett had the perfect piano on stage that night, the album wouldn’t sound the way it sounds, and it wouldn’t be as special as it is,” he said.
Mala Emde, a 29-year-old German actress, plays Brandes as a spirited and determined young woman striking out on her own, using her charm, enthusiasm and tenacity to navigate (and often bluff her way through) an exciting adult world that she cannot wait to enter. Emde carries the film on her capable shoulders. Jarrett, performed with brittle world-weariness by the American actor John Magaro, is another standout.
Köln 75 was in pre-production for four years and Fluk used that time to learn German. “By the time we were shooting, I already understood German. Now I can read, I can understand – I don’t like speaking it because I sound like an idiot — but it was enough for me to hear actors improvise, which was really important for me in this film, because it’s a film about improvisation and it needed to feel free,” he said. He added that Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, about the birth of rave culture in late 1970s Manchester, was a key inspiration in terms of tone and energy, calling it “the spirit animal of this film.”
Fluk didn’t reveal too much about his upcoming projects, which include an HBO series based on the bestselling non-fiction book Empty Mansions and a legal thriller about the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which Fluk described as “a really beautiful script and really important story about American Jews and the way they were perceived in America.”
With so many stateside projects lined up, can we expect Fluk to film again in Europe or Israel in the future?
“If the story I want to tell is located there? Absolutely,” he said. “I am very agnostic about territory. I have a film, and the film says where it needs to be shot, then we go there and shoot it.”
Köln 75 begins its theatrical run at the IFC Center in New York on Oct. 17. (It opens a week later in Los Angeles).
The post How a complete unknown created one of the most iconic music events of the 1970’s appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Downed Planes Raise New Perils for Trump as Tehran Hunts for Missing US Pilot
Traces of an Iranian missile attack in Tehran’s sky, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Two US warplanes were downed over Iran and the Gulf, Iranian and US officials said on Friday, with two pilots rescued and a third still missing and being hunted by Tehran’s forces.
The incidents show the risks still faced by US and Israeli aircraft over Iran despite assertions from US President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that their forces had total control of the skies.
The first plane, a two-seat US F-15E jet, was shot down by Iranian fire, officials in both countries said.
The second plane, an A-10 Warthog fighter aircraft, was hit by Iranian fire and crashed over Kuwait, with the pilot ejecting, two US officials said.
Two Blackhawk helicopters involved in the search effort for the missing pilot were hit by Iranian fire but made it out of Iranian airspace, the two US officials told Reuters.
The degree of injuries among the crew of the aircraft remained unclear. The status and whereabouts of the missing F-15E crew member was not publicly known.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it was combing an area near where the pilot’s plane came down in southwestern Iran and the regional governor promised a commendation for anyone who captured or killed “forces of the hostile enemy.”
Iranians, who have been pummeled by American air power for weeks, posted gleeful messages celebrating the plane downings. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that the U.S. and Israel’s war had been “downgraded from regime change” to a hunt for their pilots.
Trump has been in the White House receiving updates on the search-and-rescue operation, a senior administration official told Reuters. The Pentagon and US Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
NO SIGN OF END TO WAR
The prospect of a US service person being alive and on the run inside Iran raises the stakes for Washington in a conflict with low public support and no sign of an imminent end.
Iran has officially told mediators it is not prepared to meet with US officials in Islamabad in coming days and that efforts to produce a ceasefire, led by Pakistan, have reached a dead end, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The US and Israel opened the campaign with a wave of strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28. The war has killed thousands and threatened lasting damage to the global economy.
So far, 13 US military service members have been killed in the conflict and more than 300 have been wounded, according to the US Central Command.
Iran has rained down drones and missiles on Israel. It has also taken aim at Gulf countries allied to the US, which have so far held back from joining the war directly for fear of further escalation.
In a security alert on Friday, the US embassy in Beirut said Iran and its aligned armed groups may target universities in Lebanon and urged US citizens in the country to leave while commercial flights are still available.
Israel has been waging a parallel campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon after the militant group fired at Israel in support of Iran.
TRUMP THREAT TO STRIKE BRIDGES, POWER PLANTS
On Friday, as Trump threatened to hit its bridges and power plants, Iran struck a power and water plant in Kuwait, underlining the vulnerability of Gulf states that rely heavily on desalination plants for drinking water.
On Thursday, Trump posted footage on social media showing dust and smoke billowing up as US strikes hit the newly constructed B1 bridge between Tehran and nearby Karaj, which was due to open this year, and said more attacks would follow.
“Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) anywhere in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” he wrote in a subsequent post.
On Friday, a drone hit a Red Crescent relief warehouse in the Choghadak area of Iran’s southern Bushehr province.
Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery had been hit by drones. Other attacks were also reported to have been intercepted in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Missile debris landed near the Israeli port of Haifa, site of a major oil refinery.
Oil markets were closed after benchmark U.S. crude prices gained 11% on Thursday following a speech by Trump that offered no clear sign of an imminent end to the war.
Uncategorized
US-Iran: Diplomatic Push Falters as Qatar Steps Back and Pakistan Talks Stall
Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani speaks after a meeting with the Lebanese president at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon, Feb. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Emilie Madi
i24 News – Diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire between Washington and Tehran appear to have reached an impasse, as key regional mediators pull back and broader talks stall.
According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Qatar has informed US officials that it does not wish to take a central role in mediating between the two sides. Officials familiar with the matter said Doha has made clear it is “not willing” to lead negotiations or act as the primary broker.
At the same time, Pakistan-led efforts to bring Iranian and American officials together have also stalled. Mediators say Tehran has refused to attend proposed meetings in Islamabad, calling Washington’s conditions “unacceptable,” further underscoring the widening gap between the two sides and the growing difficulty of restarting dialogue.
Despite the deadlock, diplomatic channels have not fully closed. Turkey and Egypt are continuing parallel efforts to revive talks, with discussions underway about potential alternative venues, including Doha and Istanbul.
US President Donald Trump downplayed the impact of recent military developments on diplomacy, including the destruction of a US fighter jet during operations in Iran. Speaking in a brief exchange with an NBC News journalist, he said: “No, not at all. It’s war. We are at war.”
He further fueled speculation with a cryptic social media post on Truth Social, writing: “Keep the oil, anyone?” criticising international allies on Friday over rising fuel prices. Trump appeared to mock allies such as the United Kingdom, writing that they should “keep the oil.”
Uncategorized
Report: Iran Retains Significant Missile Capability Despite Weeks of US-Led Strikes
Iranian missiles are displayed in a park in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 31, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – Despite weeks of sustained airstrikes by the United States and its allies, Iran has reportedly managed to retain a substantial portion of its military capabilities, particularly its ballistic missile arsenal.
According to a report by The New York Times citing US intelligence assessments, Tehran has developed methods to mitigate the impact of the strikes, allowing it to preserve and restore key parts of its missile infrastructure.
While the Pentagon has claimed responsibility for striking more than 11,000 targets over five weeks and reducing the rate of Iranian missile fire, intelligence officials now caution that the actual damage may be more limited than initially assessed. Iranian forces are reportedly able to rapidly repair or reactivate missile launchers stored in heavily fortified or underground facilities, sometimes within hours of being hit.
Analysts also point to the widespread use of decoy sites, which may have drawn strikes away from operational assets. Many of the targeted locations are believed to have contained dummy installations, complicating efforts to accurately gauge the degradation of Iran’s ballistic capabilities. Combined with deep underground bunkers and dispersed storage networks, this approach is seen as enabling Tehran to maintain a higher level of readiness than publicly estimated.
US intelligence officials assess that this resilience reflects a deliberate strategy: preserving a credible long-range strike capability as both a deterrent and a bargaining tool in any future negotiations, while ensuring regime survival and continued regional influence.
Despite sustained air dominance claimed by Washington and its allies, Iran’s adaptive tactics continue to complicate battlefield assessments, leaving the true balance of power in the conflict uncertain.