Rating: NR | Runtime: 112 minutes
Release Date: March 13th, 2025 (Germany) / October 17th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Alamode Film / Zeitgeist Films
Director(s): Ido Fluk
Writer(s): Ido Fluk

Because I can’t imagine anyone turning you down.

It was a concert that still lives on today thanks to a recording sold as The Köln Concert—an album that remains the best-selling solo jazz album and solo piano recording of all time … despite the artist, Keith Jarrett, all but disowning it as an inferior product. Why? Because he was forced to play it on a baby grand rehearsal piano rather than the Grand Imperial he was promised. Because every one of his performances on this 1973 European tour was improvised and therefore built to find a favorite better suited to his own subjective taste.

But, as our omniscient narrator Michael Watts (Michael Chernus) explains at the very start, this film isn’t about Keith Jarrett (played by John Magaro). It’s about the “scaffolding” that made the show possible. The artist who orchestrated its infrastructure through two years of promoting experience despite just being sixteen when she started and eighteen when she booked Jarrett. Ido Fluk’s Köln 75 is about Vera Brandes (Mala Emde). Her response to his phone call about gaining permission to center her as the lead character: “Finally.”

If even half of her account of what happened is true (the usual “inspired by a true story” text is accompanied with the words “as told by Vera Brandes herself”), it’s a crime this tale hasn’t gotten out before. Because it’s not just the insanity of a teenager making an indelible mark on the jazz scene in Cologne at a time when it was being reduced to “museum music,” it’s also the drive to find your identity and prove a career in the arts was worthwhile regardless of what people like her dentist father (Ulrich Tukur) believed.

And boy, is he a piece of work. We meet him at Vera’s fiftieth birthday party (she’s played by Susanne Wolff in the film’s present-day bookends), rising to his feet to toast his daughter in front of a room of her closest friends and literally just saying how she was his biggest disappointment. It’s a depiction that only gets worse as we see the domineering ways in which he sought to shatter Vera’s dreams—the same totalitarian thought process that ultimately pushed her to rebel in the first place. Yes, she chose this career for herself. But a nice “f-you” target helps.

Köln 75 unfolds in three sections all helped by the fourth wall-breaking Watts inserting himself into the action for familiarity, interrupting it to add context, and, during the second portion, becoming an actual character within (sort of). The first part follows Vera’s introduction to concert booking by way of Ronnie Scott (Daniel Betts) and the friends who helped along the way—her political BFF Isa (Shirin Lilly Eissa), boyfriend Jan (Enno Trebs), begrudging brother Fritz (Leo Meier), and the corruptible Oliver (Leon Blohm).

Next is a brief chapter following Jarrett and ECM founder Manfred Eicher (Alexander Scheer) to meet the virtuoso Vera is betting her entire future on. It’s a nice little interlude that sheds light on who he was, his mystique, and the narcissism she will inevitably need to point out as a means of getting him to play on a piano he refuses to use. And it lets Watts become more than a weird interloper by giving him purpose via a desire to write an interview (although the character itself is fictitious).

The final section of the film is the real showstopper, though, as Vera returns to the spotlight to discover the biggest night of her life has devolved into a disaster. But, just as Scott told her when he recruited her to book his tour despite not knowing the first thing about doing so, it’s difficult to say no to Vera. No matter the odds stacked against her (or logic itself), she finds a way to improvise like a jazz musician and conjure solutions out of thin air. Some of it is charm. Some tenacity. Most is pushing the right buttons to motivate compliance.

It’s a fun ride through period-specific Germany with fast-paced editing that keeps us on our toes whether caught in Vera’s whirlwind (Emde is fantastic), pulled into a Watts aside, or wading through the tortured melancholy of Jarrett’s genius. Fluk infuses an energy that makes veracity an afterthought to entertainment. Watts isn’t even real, after all, and his part isn’t wholly real in the film itself. Köln 75 is instead about vibes, jazz, and the woman who made The Köln Concert iconic despite the guy who happened to be playing the music on-stage.

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Mala Emde as Vera Brandes in KÖLN 75, a film by Ido Fluk. A Zeitegist Films release in association with Kino Lorber.