Alma – Films – Visions du Réel

Rafael Palacio Illingworth
Switzerland | 2026 | 70 min
World premiere
Languages : Swiss German, Spanish, English, German
Subtitles : English, French

A filmmaker imagines his wife’s death as a mysterious disappearance in the Swiss Alps, casting his real family in an experimental exploration of grief and the search for closure. Inspired by literary autofiction, Rafael Palacio Illingworth unsettlingly blurs the line between reality, intimacy, tale and narration in an attempt to defy death itself.

In Alma, Rafael Palacio Illingworth transforms a chapter of his life into an episode of cinematic vertigo. Following his wife's battle with cancer, he transcends their experience, imagining her disappearance in the Swiss Alps and drawing his own family into a disturbing experience, somewhere between autofiction and a domestic journal of resilience. In a whirlwind of grace, the camera lingers on faces like Greek statues, sculpting their heartbreak, while outside the window the landscape seems painted, unreal and threatening. A helicopter breaks the silence and the drama starts to unfold, colours and textures shift and the film vibrates. The mountain becomes a body, entrails to be combed through, a tomb and a memory. Caught between ghost and existence, Alma explores grief as a shifting territory. Illingworth invents a beautiful, vibrant language in which reality and fiction intertwine. A bold work, deeply moving in its sincerity, in which cinema dances at the edge of the abyss.

Anne Delseth

Alma, 2026
Vida Comienza/Vida termina, 2021
Between Us, 2016
Man In A Room, 2010
Macho, 2009