À l'origine
Filippo Filliger
Switzerland | 2018 | 50 min
World premiere
Languages : French, Italian
Subtitles : English, French
“When I’m in Paris she will be alive. She must not die. Later, perhaps, when we allow it.” In 1974, when he learnt of her illness, Werner Herzog went to visit Lotte Eisner—a great historian of German film—walking across a snow-covered Europe from Munich to Paris. A crucial experience from which he would draw a book, Of Walking in Ice. Filippo Filliger revisits this gesture in To the Origin, this time with a camera, by walking from Geneva to Locarno, towards his mother, suffering from cancer, across landscapes that he has always seen scroll past behind a train or car window, but “never lived”. It is in the belly of the mountain, in the opening sequence of the film, that he takes the decision to extend his travels so as to delay the fatal outcome of the illness and allow feelings of sadness to emerge, enabling him to let his loved one leave peacefully. On the way, time slows down, giving rise to encounters, impromptu dialogues, visual flashes: as if rejuvenating the consideration of the least one can do.
Emmanuel Chicon
