Schwemmgut
Aurelio Buchwalder
Switzerland | 2016 | 24 min
World premiere
Languages : Italian, German, English
Subtitles : English, French
The River Po is the backbone of Italy: the plains it waters are the most fer- tile in the country. Rising at the foot of Mount Viso in the Cottian Alps, its course long served as a cardinal communication channel between Turin and the sea, while its capillary delta melts into the Adriatic. Aurelio Buchwalder decided to travel up it, geographically, while travelling back against the flow of time. The images of Renaissance painting and the static shot of a man playing the theorbo stylise the traces of history. Leafing through an album of black-and-white photographs retraces the epoch of inland water shipping, and the encounters over the course of the river lay out a narration by stratum that make time non-linear. While the story of an African immigrant who hopes to construct his future life here comes as a delayed answer to the mythological-poetic origin of the Po that a protagonist recounts to us... Like a cinematographical vagrancy, Driftage gradually deposits fragments of the real, as if they were imaginary alluvium, as it progresses and meanders.
Emmanuel Chicon