When: December 2nd, 17:45 Onwards

Meeting Point: Alt & Neu Records, Windmühlgasse 10, 1060, Vienna

When I saw that Before Sunrise (one of my top 5 movies) was getting a 30-year anniversary screening at Gartenbaukino, I knew I had to ask my friend and HEIMAT Muse Dominykas - our Modern Flâneur - to come. Something about the film, its way of noticing small details and its observational view of Vienna, has always felt uncannily aligned with how he moves through life and sees the world. It felt like the perfect pairing. And as these things tend to go, the idea grew.  What began as two friends planning a trip to the cinema quickly grew into a small gathering. Then a plan to pair the screening with an evening spent drifting through the film’s key locations. And finally, an impulse to open a handful of spots for you, our readers, to join us and get to know Vienna, and Before Sunrise a little more through his eyes.

Before Sunrise is not only (in my humble opinion) one of the most beautiful romance films ever made, it’s also one of the most significant cinematic portraits of Vienna captured on film. Richard Linklater’s approach, is stripped almost entirely of plot and built instead on real-time dialogue while wandering. Shot entirely on location, it captured a 90s Vienna of cafés, plazas, snippets of the Viennese (nothing has changed) and nocturnal scenes. But the film’s true impact lies in the conversation that threads through it - a steady flow that drifts between the seemingly banal and catch-you-off-guard profound - all while watching intimacy grow throughout both.

It later became the first part of Linklater’s now-iconic trilogy: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013) - three films that unfold across the 90s, 00s, and 10s, giving the trilogy a temporal span that mirrors how relationships stretch, people change over time and how small decisions can alter one’s course of life.

But back to Before Sunrise - in the fashion of the film we’re making an evening of the screening. Before arriving at Gartenbaukino, we’ll move through a constellation of places that shaped both the film and the Vienna Dominykas loves: Alt & Neu Records, Café Sperl, the Albertina Steps, and Franziskanerplatz. Along the way, he’ll share insights into what Jesse and Céline speak about in each of these scenes as well as the architecture, history, and cultural nuance behind every stop.

We’ll start at Alt & Neu Records - known in 1995 as Teuchtler Schallplattenhandlung und Antiquariat - the record-store scene from Before Sunrise.

The atmosphere is a true reflection of 90s Vienna, when record shops were cultural hubs, places where subcultures gathered and long conversations were had. Run by the Teuchtler family, one of the city’s earliest and most beloved vinyl dealers, the shop embodied an old Vienna sensibility: shelves stacked to the ceiling, slightly sagging floors, handwritten labels, and the family’s famously encyclopedic (and delightfully eccentric) knowledge of music. For Dominykas, starting the evening here was essential because it captures the version of Vienna the film immortalises: unpolished and intimate - the perfect prologue to the screening.

Inside the shop, the Before Sunrise scene is almost wordless - that’s what makes it so charged. Jesse and Céline drift through the aisles, pretending to browse while stealing glances they think the other won’t notice. Then they step into the listening booth, standing close but looking everywhere except at each other. It’s barely a minute of film, almost nothing happens, and yet it’s one of the most romantic moments of the whole film. The whole scene rests on hesitation, on the electricity of almost-eye contact, on the awareness that something is beginning - even if neither of them says a single thing.

From the record store, it’s a two-minute walk to Café Sperl, the same Kaffeehaus that appears in Before Sunrise where we will sit for a drink and a small bite. 

At Café Sperl, Jesse and Céline slip into one of the film’s most intimate moments - the fake phone calls, where the safety of pretending allows them to finally say what they’re afraid to say directly.

Céline admits, “As the night went on I began to like him more and more. But I’m afraid he’s scared of me. I told him of my story about the woman killing her ex-boyfriend and stuff. He must be thinking I’m this manipulative, mean, dangerous woman. I just hope he doesn’t feel that way about me because - you know me - I’m the most harmless person. I just hide behind angriness because it’s the only way I’ve found to protect myself. The only person I could ever really hurt is myself.”

And Jesse, in his own fictional “call,” reveals how disarmed he is by her: “I don’t think she really liked me at the beginning. She is so smart and passionate and beautiful - I felt so unsure of myself. I felt everything I was saying sounded so stupid.”

It’s one of the film’s softest emotional pivots - two people circling the truth of what they feel, but only able to express it through this fictional scenario of a phone call.

Once we settle in, Dominykas will speak about what cafés like Sperl represent: Vienna’s long-standing culture of slow conversation. Sperl hasn’t changed much, which is exactly its significance. It is also home to our weekly HEIMAT Stammtisch, where we meet our Muses every Friday to exchange ideas, notes, and thoughts on the week unfolding in Vienna. 

Tip from Dominykas: If your coffee arrives with the spoon placed face-down across the glass of water, don’t turn it over - it’s an old Habsburg-era signal that the water was freshly poured, a small Viennese detail most miss.

From Sperl, we begin our walk towards Gartenbaukino, taking the route through the Albertina Steps - just a ten-minute walk - the staircase where Jesse and Céline pause in Before Sunrise for one of the film’s most beautiful portraits of Vienna. It’s here that they share a brief moment, with Céline saying softly, “It’s so weird. It’s like our time together is just ours - it’s our own creation. It’s like I’m in your dream and you’re in mine.”

Dominykas notes how the Steps hold that same atmosphere today: a place where private conversations unfold in public and where the city seems to recede just enough to let something intimate happen. Next time you are walking up the Albertina steps take a moment to look around and notice this.

Just like in the film, we won’t linger for long before continuing our walk toward Gartenbaukino, arriving just in time to grab popcorn and settle in before the lights dim. As Vienna’s last great single-screen cinema, Gartenbaukino has hosted everything from arthouse premieres to the opening nights of the Viennale. Its vast auditorium - red velvet, a stage, a full curtain - is a rarity now, and exactly the sort of place Before Sunrise deserves to return to.

Watching Before Sunrise in the middle of the evening may feel unusual at first, but it is intentional. More than a film screening, the night is a masterclass in seeing Vienna the way Before Sunrise taught us to see it - through small moments, conversations, and the beauty of paying attention. By the time we step back into the city, the film will have sharpened our eyes to everything around us.

After the screening we’ll end our night with a nightcap (or two) at Kleines Café - a five-minute walk from the cinema - tucked into the corner of Franziskanerplatz, a small square that always feels like it belongs to another time. Designed by Hermann Czech - one of Dominykas’s favourite Austrian architects - the café is a masterclass in understated restraint: calibrated proportions, controlled sightlines, and an atmosphere shaped entirely through spatial logic. Dominykas will share why Czech remains such an influential figure in Austrian architecture, and how his principles of minimal intervention and spatial thinking still shape Vienna’s most thoughtful interiors.

Kleines Café appears briefly in Before Sunrise, in the scene where Jesse and Céline sit outside and exchange a few awkward, banal lines before being approached by a fortune teller who goes on to leave them with a line, that we’ll leave this article with: “You need to resign yourself to the awkwardness of life. Only if you find peace within yourself will you find true connection with others.”

Ruby Arabella Wallen tracks the city’s pulse, observes its culture and characters, and works with a small circle of her personal muses to create you a weekly Sunday Dispatch - your blueprint to the week ahead in Vienna.