Berlinale 2026: The Loneliest Man in Town | Interview with Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel

“The Mississippi is frozen solid in Vienna, at least in Al Cook’s imagination,” states director Rainer Frimmel, laughing. He is talking about a scene in the film The Loneliest Man in Town, which is part of the competition of the 76th Berlinale.

Filmmakers Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel are known for their in-depth personal stories of interesting protagonists and this time, they follow a blues musician who built an intensely American inner landscape without ever leaving Austria, and whose stubborn refusal to compromise has cost him almost everything and given him a very specific kind of freedom.

The film follows an 80-plus Alois Koch, also known in the blues music scene in Vienna as Al Cook, a figure of radical non-compromise, who, according to the directors, has turned down international managers and refused to play with stars like Eric Clapton because the sound is not “original Delta blues”, and accepts a modest, precarious life over a career that might have made him famous.

“We have known Al for many years and he has even attended our film premieres. It was interesting to know him and we thought it would be nice to make a film on him and tell his story to the world,” said Rainer.

“What’s beautiful is that the film is not a dossier on ‘missed success’ but an exploration of grief, loss and aging carried by a man who, in real life, loves to talk and has even written a 700-page autobiography,” added Tizza.

For the filmmakers, the hardest part of the film was persuading Al to play a quieter person, to accept that biography can sometimes close a story instead of opening it, and that a near-silent performance can make him a symbol for anyone who has lost a partner, an apartment, or a sense of being understood.

“For us, the casting of the other characters in the film is more like opening a series of Matryoshka dolls, people we encountered in small concerts decades ago — old gangsters and lawyers from earlier documentaries — one a real criminal, another one of Vienna’s most famous lawyers, whose proximity on screen makes the line between legality and crime almost indistinguishable,” said Rainer.

The directors agree that improvisation was key, especially in scenes where generations clash. “Like that of a young woman asking for vinyl while Al riffs about shellac, or the story of the leopard, tiger and dog, letting humour emerge from the friction between different worlds and different temporalities.”

Rainer shot the film on 16mm with candlelight and minimal gear. “We were trying to build images that felt like physical memories in a story obsessed with objects like Elvis busts, tapes, vinyl, a cellar thick with things that testify to a life. Watching Al slowly give pieces of that collection away was painful precisely because, as you say, the emotions are not acted. He was genuinely distressed at parting with certain items, especially his recordings and archives, which he would never surrender.”

Although the film talks about loneliness through Al’s story, it is also a quiet manifesto for analog experience. “Al’s lifelong dream of America threads through everything, even though he has never set foot there. Our own feelings about that ‘land of freedom’ have shifted, and we feel that Al holds on to his imagined Mississippi rather than encounter a reality shaped by guns, political fracture and disappointment, echoing Egon Friedell’s warning that when dreams come true, they can turn into nightmares,” adds Tizza.

When Al finally saw the finished film, the filmmakers said that he was deeply moved and a little stunned to be having a “new experience” so late in life. “Especially after nights in the 1960s when bar owners literally paid him to stop playing. The Loneliest Man in Town turns that old humiliation inside out. In Venice, in packed cinemas and cramped interview rooms, people line up to hear his story, not just as a blues curiosity from Vienna, but as a man whose carefully guarded sadness now belongs, a little bit, to everyone,” the filmmakers have the last word.

Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.