Landschaft und Wahn

Nicole Vögele
Switzerland | 2024 | 138 min
World premiere
Languages : Bosnian, Farsi, Dari, Kurdish
Subtitles : English, French

Grand Jury Prize offered by la Mobilière

Along the Bosnian-Croatian border near Velika Kladuša, the paths of mine disposal experts, migrating families and locals cross. Director Nicole Vögele hones in on these encounters, laying bare the wounds of the war of the 1990s and those of the refugees of today. A deeply telluric film, a kaleidoscope of landscapes haunted by the fury of past and present.

Filmed from a subjective point of view, the camera feels its way forwards through a forest plunged into darkness. The wide shot which follows shows far-off silhouettes moving along the edge of the forest, while mine-clearing experts map another area further off in the distance. The Bosnian-Croatian border, near Velika Kladuša, is the starting point for this new film by Nicole Vögele begins (Fog, Visions du Réel 2014). As the border area between Europe and the Balkans, it was one of the areas of conflict in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Today, migrants pass through the area to escape ongoing conflicts in their homelands. The director follows the rhythm of the seasons to capture what is unfolding here and now in this liminal landscape, using a formal approach which relies on the patient scrupulousness of direct cinema. It is a place where the exiles passing through lose their bearings, abandoning their meagre belongings as they flee, the visible presence of which reopens the scars of the past, but also demands solidarity in the present. The Landscape and The Fury shies away from any sense of narrative facileness - even as it tends towards the scope of a fresco, in both the pictorial and literary sense - as it surveys this landscape afflicted by human contention with a magnificent sense of restraint.

Emmanuel Chicon
The Landscape and the Fury, 2024
Closing Time, 2018
Nebel, 2014
Into the Innards, 2014
Frau Loosli, 2013

Trailer

Photography
Stefan SickStefan Sick
Sound
Jean-Pierre GerthJonathan Schorr
Editing
Hannes Bruun
Music
Alva Noto
Production
Adrian BlaserBeauvoir FilmsAline SchmidBeauvoir Films
Sales contact
Aline SchmidBeauvoir Filmsaline@beauvoirfilms.ch

International Feature Film Competition

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