Slow down. Log off.

In a world of constant stimulation, focusing on a single screen is an act of self-care. You slow down, you get lost, and you even allow yourself to be bored. In short: the survival skills we’ve gradually lost.

Short clips, quick swipes, and endless notifications. Thanks to our small screens, attention has become a scarce commodity. We’ve forgotten how to truly look at something without being distracted. Silence feels awkward. We avoid boredom at all costs. And the moment a void opens up, we fill it with an endless stream of online imagery that vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

With the film program Slackers & Drifters, we are reclaiming our attention. No small-screen algorithms deciding what you see, but real people carefully selecting films specifically for the big screen. No images screaming for your attention, but films that slow down, embrace silence, and leave room to daydream or stare the maddening void right in the eye.

DRIFTING

When was the last time you truly got lost? Now that we carry smartphones with built-in navigation everywhere, we all seem to know exactly where we’re going. From point A to point B, preferably via the shortest or fastest route.

But with our fear of getting lost, we also lose our sense of adventure, something the two men in Kelly Reichardt’s OLD JOY (2006) are desperately trying to rediscover. They rely on an outdated road map and a vague memory to find a remote hot spring in the woods. Spoiler alert: they get lost. In Aleksandre Koberidze’s latest lo-fi gem DRY LEAF (2025), Lisa and her father wander through the Georgian countryside, capturing abandoned football pitches with an old Sony Ericsson phone. It is a meditation on disappearing, letting go, and being in transit, in the spirit of the Iranian master Kiarostami. This sense of drifting and disappearing becomes even more radical in Michelangelo Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER (1975). Jack Nicholson plays David Locke, a journalist who assumes the identity of a deceased guest in a dusty Saharan hotel. He isn’t just wandering aimlessly; he is running away from himself.

That drifting often coincides with an existential quest is made tangible in Barbara Loden’s WANDA (1970). While David Locke makes a conscious choice for a different life, Wanda drifts through bleak Pennsylvania not out of desire, but out of detachment. Her erratic journey is a radical rejection of the role expected of her as a woman and mother.

Urban jungle
While some seek the void to disappear, the youth in the films of Taiwanese masters Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang lose themselves in excess: concrete, neon, and speed. In TAIPEI STORY (1985), we see how the rapid modernization of the city alienates its inhabitants; they wander their own familiar streets as if they’ve become hostile territory. In Tsai’s work, this drifting takes on a feverish quality. In REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (1992), teenagers zoom aimlessly on their scooters through a nocturnal, rain-soaked Taipei. They flee the suffocating apartments of their parents, seeking a foothold in anonymous, leaking spaces.

In the colorful, sunny Kingston of 1977, drummer Leeroy ‘Horsemouth’ Wallace also tries to get a grip on his life. In ROCKERS (1978), he buys a motorcycle to earn money by distributing reggae records. When it gets stolen, he transforms into a sort of Robin Hood, tackling the injustices of his city. Similarly, private eye Philip Marlowe battles crime in 1970s Los Angeles in Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973). But Elliott Gould doesn’t play the detective with the icy cool of Humphrey Bogart; he portrays a drifting sleuth, lost in a city he no longer understands.

SLOWING DOWN

Did you know that we walk through city centers faster today than we did thirty years ago? That we even talk much faster than our predecessors? The earth might rotate the sun as it always has, but life upon it is racing more frantically than ever.

In the city, everything accelerates. Wim Wenders travels to the city of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu in TOKYO-GA (1985). In Ozu’s films, the decline of Japanese identity was shown in a quiet harmony. “Not by pointing disapprovingly at everything new, Western, or American,” Wenders noted, “but by mourning the loss that is taking place with a restrained, unidealized nostalgia.” As he wanders through Tokyo, he inevitably thinks of the harmonious metropolis from Ozu’s films and wonders: does a rapidly changing city lose its memory? Do its inhabitants lose their past?

In kogonada’s COLUMBUS (2017), it becomes clear we are losing something else: our patience, our attention, and even our interests. The film follows the budding friendship between Casey, stuck in her hometown of Columbus, and Jin, stranded there by the illness of his architect father. While tourists flood the town, residents try to escape the tranquility and the beauty that has become invisible to them. kogonada forces us to stop along with them. His camera barely moves, and his frames are so perfectly composed that a hasty glance would be an insult. He points toward beauty and teaches us how patience can be a virtue.

Merciless patience
Sometimes, however, this slowing down is merciless, bringing the less beautiful things into sharp focus. In Béla Tarr’s THE TURIN HORSE (2011), there is no escape from the heavy repetition of daily survival. The film opens with a multi-minute shot of a horse battling the wind, so long that you begin to feel the physical resistance yourself. Tarr makes us watch a father and daughter eating potatoes in a desolate hut for six days. This is cinema that refuses to be “consumed”; it must be endured. Only then do you begin to see the smallest details: the swirling dust, the texture of a wooden table, the deep furrows in a face.

Lucrecia Martel’s ZAMA (2017) proves that waiting can take on a feverish, hallucinatory form. A Spanish officer in a remote colonial post waits years for a letter from the King that will finally send him home. Time doesn’t stand still here; it becomes elastic and palpable. Martel lets the ambient sounds and impressions gradually swell until the viewer, like Zama, begins to lose their grip on reality. Slowing down is not a moment of rest; it is an existential endurance test.

Yet, there is a deep humanity hidden in the slowdown. In Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU (1952), a bureaucrat discovers he is terminally ill. The film slows down just as his life is reaching its end. In his remaining time, he tries to perform one meaningful act: the construction of a playground. Here, slowing down means finally setting priorities. Similarly, in Kim Ki-duk’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER… AND SPRING (2003), we see how the rhythm of nature transcends human impulses. The seasons pass, the years slip by, and the film reminds us that we are merely passers-by in a much larger, slower story.

Those who dare to take their time see more. This is further evidenced in Claire Denis’ BEAU TRAVAIL (1999), where the story of a French Foreign Legion unfolds through rhythm, isolation, and repetition. With ’TILL MADNESS DO US PART (2013), Wang Bing goes a step further. On a locked floor of a psychiatric institution in southwest China, men share the same cramped spaces and endless rhythm. Days bleed into one another without beginning or end. Without explanation or context, Wang forces the viewer to remain in that duration, even when it chafes or falls silent. It is precisely amidst this isolation and existential boredom that Wang finds flickers of humanity.

BOREDOM

Boredom is fertile ground for cinema. It reveals not only how we try to avoid the void, but also what emerges when we embrace it. Without realizing it, the loafers and bored souls of film have perhaps become true pioneers: they show us how to allow the emptiness in, rather than immediately plugging it with a quick dopamine fix from a smartphone.

Nowhere was boredom more cultivated than in the 1990s. In SLACKER (1990), Richard Linklater simply lets the camera jump from one resident of Austin, Texas, to another. They are street philosophers discussing conspiracy theories, the meaning of Madonna, or absolutely nothing. During a cameo, Linklater tells a taxi driver about a dream: “Do you ever have those dreams that feel completely real? So vivid it seems totally real?” The driver doesn’t respond. “Anyway, that dream just now was exactly like that, except nothing strange happened. Nothing happened at all.”

That same slacker spirit haunts the video store in Kevin Smith’s CLERKS (1994). Between the racks of VHS tapes, Dante and Randal kill time with biting dialogue and a game of rooftop hockey. Their boredom isn’t a philosophy of life; it’s just a way to get through the day.

Endless moments
The Mexican film TEMPORADA DE PATOS (2004) shows that boredom can also have a compelling, almost surreal power. When the power goes out in an apartment building, two teenagers are stranded in a vacuum without video games or television. What follows is a languid afternoon revolving around a late pizza delivery, a neighbor wanting to bake a cake, and a painting of flying ducks. It is an ode to those moments where apparently nothing happens, but where human connections are given the chance to sprout.

Sometimes this boredom borders on the absurd, as in Alex van Warmerdam’s ABEL (1986). Thirty-year-old Abel refuses to leave his parents’ house and kills time by clipping flies out of the air with a massive pair of scissors. It’s certainly a more challenging activity than what the iconic BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD are known for: watching television.

When their TV is stolen in BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA (1996), the two iconic loafers finally leave their beloved couch to steal one back. Their teacher, catching them trying to steal the classroom TV, suggests that the loss of their device could be a positive thing: “There’s a big, exciting world out there waiting when we discover we don’t need a television to entertain us.” To which the duo replies: “Entertain us… anus.” The long-haired teacher sighs: “Did you hear a single word I said?” “Yeah,” the TV junkies reply. “Anus.”

Hotel Boredom
Boredom here is not a lack, but an open space. In Sofia Coppola’s SOMEWHERE (2010), that space becomes a room in the iconic Chateau Marmont, where a movie star confronts himself while bored out of his mind. The hotel staff knows the feeling too. In Robina Rose’s punk film NIGHTSHIFT (1981), the night manager watches apathetically as the lobby drama unfolds in a city that never sleeps. In Joanna Hogg’s ARCHIPELAGO (2010), the setting shifts to a holiday home on an island. During a family trip, so many awkward silences fall that what remains unsaid eventually eclipses everything else.

What remains when the noise falls away? That question keeps returning. In Nobuhiro Yamashita’s LINDA LINDA LINDA (2005), a group of idling Japanese girls try to play the void away with drums, guitars, and punk songs. They practice for a school rock show, but at the moment of their own concert, they are found simply napping out of boredom. And is boredom perhaps the elephant in the room in ELEPHANT (2003)? In Gus Van Sant’s film about two teenagers preparing for something horrific, that apathetic feeling seems to be the breeding ground for their monstrous metamorphosis.

Boredom and slowness take many forms in film. But one thing is certain: in a world screaming for your attention, the cinema offers a rare sanctuary. Whether you’re wandering the Sahara with Jack Nicholson, nesting on the couch next to Beavis and Butt-Head, or checking into a hotel where boredom is included in the room rate: with Slackers & Drifters, the cinema becomes a refuge for undisturbed enjoyment. Whatever you choose: silence your phone. Let the images do the work. Log off. Drift away.