Stadtkino Basel has announced its 2026/27 season together with a redesigned visual identity, ending 19 years in which the graphic designer Ludovic Balland shaped the cinema’s appearance. The commission went, after what the cinema calls an intensive selection process, to the young design studios Data-Orbit and Lucas Manser, whose identity turns the cinema’s curatorial stance into a single graphic idea: perspective. The cinema presents this less as a cosmetic refresh than as a flexible system, one that opens new angles on film art, history and the present much as cinema itself does.
The programme published so far runs from late August to the end of September. Two film series anchor it. ‘On the Rocks – Cocktails im Kino’ traces cocktails through film history from 27 August to 28 September in ten titles, among them ‘Casablanca’, ‘The Thin Man’, ‘Our Man in Havana’, ‘Soy Cuba’, ‘Lost in Translation’, ‘Boogie Nights’, ‘Casino Royale’, ‘La grande bellezza’, ‘Triangle of Sadness’ and Claude Goretta’s ‘L’Invitation’.
‘Cruz con Bardem’ runs from 27 August to 30 September and gathers eleven films by and with Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, whose shared screen history began with Bigas Luna’s ‘Jamón Jamón’ in 1992, before their off-screen relationship. The series pairs their joint films with solo highlights: ‘Abre los ojos’, ‘Before Night Falls’, ‘Biutiful’, ‘Carne trémula’, ‘Jamón Jamón’, ‘Loving Pablo’, ‘Mar adentro’, ‘The Counselor’, ‘Todos lo saben’, ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ and ‘Volver’.
Two new features headline the autumn. Angela Schanelec’s ‘Meine Frau weint’ (Germany/France 2026, 92 minutes), shown at the Berlinale, screens three times between 28 August and 23 September — on 28 August at 18:30 in the director’s presence, then on 11 September at 19:00 and 23 September at 20:45. Tobias Nölle’s documentary fiction ‘Tristan Forever’ (Switzerland 2026, 90 minutes), also a Berlinale title, has five screenings between 17 and 30 September, opening on 17 September at 18:30 with Nölle present. The film follows the French Médecins Sans Frontières doctor Loran Bonnardot to Tristan da Cunha; Bonnardot is credited as co-director, co-writer and lead. Nölle’s short ‘René’ won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2007 and his debut feature ‘Aloys’ the Berlinale’s FIPRESCI prize in 2016.
Special programmes include the Theaterplatz-Fest on Saturday 12 September from 12:00, with cocktails and mocktails, projection-booth tours and both a cinema and a children’s programme. The platform Filmexplorer also launches an expanded-cinema series in cooperation with the cinema, ‘Re-Imagining the Public Space: Film trifft Stadt – Dialog im öffentlichen Raum’, which extends screenings into the city through talks and walks and is supported by the Christoph Merian Stiftung. It opens with ‘Takara’ by Kohei Igarashi and Damien Manivel (Japan/France 2017, 78 minutes) on Saturday 19 September at 16:00, followed by a walk and an apéro with guests in cooperation with Q4 West Architekten.
The cinema’s newsletter additionally announces a screening of ‘The Visitor’ by the Lithuanian director and cinematographer Vytautas Katkus, winner of the international competition at the 15th Bildrausch Filmfest Basel in May, on 25 September at 18:30 with a talk by Katkus afterwards; that date is not yet listed in the cinema’s online September schedule.
Stadtkino Basel screens at Klostergasse 5 in Basel, with its office, the Landkino operation and the Kinemathek at Theaterstrasse 22, and is a member of FIAF. Its Landkino venues are the Sputnik in Liestal, Im Alten Kino in Allschwil and the Marabu in Gelterkinden.
