FOCUS ON SWITZERLAND
EXPERIENCES & ENCOUNTERS

A child bakes with her father. The pulsating mass of dough pulls her into an emotional abyss of loss and existential dread. Fine line drawing is offset by a stop motion ocean, as the director oscillates between material and visceral realities. Until memory merges them together.

Once upon a time, the fox queen was the saddest of them all. That's why she became the queen. Or was it the other way around? Heavy is the head that wears the crown. To make their queen smile again, foxes rummage through trash, searching for love letters that were never sent.

A distinctly 70s, psychedelic, black silica sand animation. A body morphs through a series of associations. Images drift and blend together, like a dream. The Jungian aesthetic signals the director's work in the Cery psychiatric hospital, where she used animation as a therapeutic tool.

C yearns for intimacy, yet in that pursuit pushes people away. But C does not give up. Again and again, she tries to find the tenderness she seeks. ‘Everything I touch, everything I feel, is nothing but a fantasy. A Milky Way mote of dust in the galaxy.’

A series of prisms mimic human movement, a disembodied parody of exercise regimes. Getting in shape, in form, with Lotti Bauer has a Bauhaus feel to it.

A man struggles against the perils of everyday life.

Sunday, Fulesee. Two people go diving in a lake. They understand each other without words, everything seems okay. But the dive leads to darkness, light disappears. Angst rises in him, which he cannot express in scuba diving hand signals. A poetic sand animation.

Image codes and their variants: an experiment in databending. Photographs glitch and transmutate into sound and text files, then back into images. The film takes its title from Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999).

A young woman recalls the strange life and premature death of her cousin, a reporter in the Yugoslav war. Poetically rendered in inky monochrome, her gothic dreamscapes evoke facts she cannot know and horrors she cannot fathom.

A man wanders through a bustling city. Urban white noise rings, resonates and ricochets in his mind until he becomes enraptured by a dog. An interesting blend of negatives, line drawing, watercolour and rotoscoping.

Rosa sunbathes in her garden. A sensual, rhythmic back-and-forth ensues as the gardener next door drenches delicate flowers while she puts on sunscreen. Fecund and facetious, the film revels in the female gaze while celebrating sexual agency.