Köln 75

Ido Fluk's Köln 75 premiered as a Berlinale Special Gala at the Berlin Film Festival in 2025. The film consolidated Fluk, an Israeli-American director after his earlier The Ticket (2016), as a director of dual European-American sensibilities. The film tells the story behind Keith Jarrett's legendary 24 January 1975 Köln Concert, one of the best-selling jazz piano albums of all time and one of the most-loved live-recording artefacts in the wider jazz canon.

Vera Brandes (Mala Emde, in the central performance widely cited as the year's most distinctive central debut) is a rebellious teenage concert promoter from a comfortable Cologne family who, against her parents' wishes and against the broader Cologne classical-music establishment's expectations, has booked Keith Jarrett (John Magaro) to perform a solo improvisation concert at the Cologne Opera House. The film follows the long lead-up to the performance, the difficulty of finding an appropriate piano, the complications of Jarrett's travel from Switzerland, the broader logistics of booking a near-eight-hundred-person classical venue for a jazz performance that the concert hall's management resented.

The film operates as character study, music-history-document, and meditation on what it takes for a young person to insist on something the established culture is not yet ready to hear. The Cologne 1975 Köln Concert performance (performed by Jarrett on a damaged Bösendorfer that the venue had provided in error) went on to become one of the most-loved live-recording artefacts in the wider jazz canon. The film's reception was particularly strong in Germany, where the underlying historical events have continued to be culturally significant.