Köln 75

I wasn't sure what this film was about when I started watching, but I am sure happy I stuck with it. This may well be one of my favourite films of 2025. Koln 75 tells the story of a teenage girl named Vera, who had that entrepreneurial fire burning inside her from the age of 16. She's the kind of girl who makes things happen. With a strict dad who wants her to be a dentist, a surly brother, a supportive group of friends and a lot of chutzpa, Vera Brandes discovers her ability to make the impossible possible when it comes to promoting and booking shows for jazz musicians.

I loved every minute. The directing is inspired, and the cast do a superb job in bringing this true story to life. At one point the movie plays like an edge of your seat thriller. I would recommend this coming-of-age film, however if you are a Keith Jarret fan you may be a tad disappointed, as not much of his music is featured. Enjoy the journey, this is a solid 8.

"Köln 75" attempts to tell the remarkable true story of Vera Brandes, who at just 17 became an accidental jazz concert promoter responsible for Keith Jarrett's legendary Cologne Concert. Unfortunately, the film hits too many wrong notes to create a harmonious whole.

The premise is fascinating: a teenage jazz enthusiast finds herself organizing concerts while sacrificing her education, family relationships, and planned medical career. The generational conflict between father and daughter serves as the film's emotional core, while the backdrop of 1970s jazz culture provides atmospheric texture.

However, the execution falters in several key areas. Most glaringly, the film's inability to secure rights to Jarrett's actual music or cooperation from the musician himself creates an ethical dilemma that the production never satisfactorily resolves. How do you make a film centered around one of history's most celebrated improvised piano performances without the actual music or blessing of its creator? This absence leaves a void at the film's center that no amount of narrative workarounds can fill.

The portrayal of Keith Jarrett is particularly problematic. He's depicted primarily through suffering-physical pain, artistic frustration, and the indignities of poor venue conditions-building toward a transcendent performance that the audience never actually experiences. It's a cinematic tease without payoff.

The age discrepancy between the teenage protagonist and the significantly older actress playing her creates another layer of dissonance. Combined with numerous "let's pretend" moments where the film skirts around its inability to depict key elements authentically, the result feels less like artistic license and more like compromised storytelling.

What could have been an insightful exploration of artistry, generational divides, and unexpected coming-of-age instead feels disjointed and incomplete. Perhaps the most awkward moment comes when a music journalist character breaks the fourth wall to deliver a lecture on jazz evolution and Jarrett's innovations directly to the audience. This exposition dump, with its superficial explanations and random factoids, feels lifted straight from a Wikipedia page-a clumsy attempt to provide context that the film itself fails to establish organically.

The film offers glimpses of what might have been-the entering an adult life teenage adventures of securing an opera hall, finding the right piano, and selling tickets which provide some genre specific charm-but these moments can't compensate for the fundamental disconnects at the film's core.

"Köln 75" ultimately hits too many false notes to resonate with the power of the legendary musician and the jazz music itself that inspired it.

Saw this at the Ghent film festival 2025, where it was part of the "Sound and Vision" section. The jazz improvisation event by Jarrett in the Köln Opera is marked as an important event, known by best-selling albums recorded from that performance. Be that as it may, for me the word "jazz" alone usually scares me off. And "coming of age" works the same way for me. The sole reason that I saw this movie was that it was scheduled in the Ghent film festival at a moment there was nothing else to see, so it was a choice by default.

Luckily for me, the movie does not contain overloads of jazz in the usual sense of the word, something I avoid when possible. Indeed, there are several kinds of "jazz" under the same container term, as explained in the movie. I promise to remember it in the future.

Apart from the educational aspect (for me, at least), the story is entertaining, by combining (a) a family story of a dentist with two children who don't follow the path of their parents, each in their own way, and (b) how daughter Vera became a to-be-music-promotor, who organized a breakthrough solo-concert with loads of sheer luck and determination. As one-off entertainment it is a success: the story is nowhere boring and something interesting is happening all the time. I imagine how easy and tempting it is to identify oneself with 20-year-old Vera and the way she breaks through walls to achieve the near-impossible. Even when at least half of the story is true, she is someone who can find unusual ways and stops at nothing.

Well-done casting and acting, and the respective roles are believable. I cannot determine how much of the story is really based on true events, and how much is added to smooth the storytelling and keep the attention of us viewers. Especially the last half hour is full of hyperactivity and last-minute actions, showing lots of poor planning and near misses by our heroin. A normal person could wind up completely out of breath with this level of activity, as we vicariously do as well in following it all on screen. How well everything still proved to turn out all right eventually, despite the odds, is no spoiler but is clear from the reason behind this movie itself (no memorable event, no movie).

All in all, movie tells the story very well, and all actors contribute to the final result. However, I still don't really know how the music by Keith Jarret really sounds, nor how it would feel to be taken away with the flow of that music. The fragments we heard were too short for that, something unavoidable given the limited running time of a movie like this.

In January 1975, Cologne student Vera Brandes organized a concert by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett at the Cologne Opera House, which became world-famous as The Cologne Concert. This highly successful film by Israeli director Ido Fluk tells the story of how it all came about.

Mala Emde (German Film Award 2025: nominated for Cologne 75) plays the busy, jazz-loving high school student, and John Magaro stars as jazz legend Jarrett. Ido Fluk demonstrates a keen sense for the West German atmosphere of the 1970s and creates a small cinematic monument to the spontaneous ability to improvise, only occasionally indulging in a bad habit of German-language cinema and having the characters recite too many explanations.

Funny, dynamic, and well-cast even in the supporting roles! Ulrich TUKUR (GERMAN FILM AWARD 2009: Lola for JOHN RABE) and Jördis TRIEBEL (GERMAN FILM AWARD 2023: Lola for IN A LAND THAT NO LONGER EXISTS) deserve special mention as the parents of Vera Brandes, who still works as a music manager today.