If Music | St.Moritz Art Film Festival 2026

After three intense days at the St. Moritz Art Film Festival, I read the notes in my notebook.

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I’ve noted: “Embarking on a festival”.

It rains. Cold air in the middle of summer. The welcome at “The Dracula’s Ghost Riders Club” is made up of red velvet and low lighting. The welcome is warm, personal. A bunch of curators, artists, and journalists meet around art films. There is no separation between stage and audience. Upholstered chairs are scattered across what seems to be a dance floor, which becomes an intimate arena of passionate watching and passionate discussions. The screening room is as large as the nearby restaurant. Sharing becomes the natural attitude of the participants, even if they are meeting for the first time. The recipe of artistic director Stefano Rabolli Pansera and managing director Diana Segantini is perfectly rounded.

The wooden structure creaks with our movements. We hear some sms lowing during the screenings. “If Music” is this year’s theme, and it refers to a verse by Shakespeare: “If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it […]” (Twelfth Night, 1.1). Are we in a listening bar? The festival is a gathering without passive spectators – as probably every festival is in its first editions. The festival is a cruise I’ve embarked on. Facing the screen, my ears are wide open. Will noises sound like music?

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I’ve noted: “Subliminal music”.

What if music has become white noise? In Dominic Michel’s Golden Sunset (2026), the uninteresting image layer is incidental; what matters are the songs in taxis, stores, and restaurants, which are encountered – or, better, highlighted – within the urban landscape, where they have become mere background. Michel’s highlighting makes me think of Harun Farocki’s thematization of “operational images”: images that are usually meant to be just an instrument, a vehicle, a function. Through Michel’s filmic gesture, a sort of “operational music” becomes perceptible again, a possible bearer of meaning.

Popular music, being hyper-present, can become imperceptible. A perfect case study is Jonathan Horowitz’s wonderful video essay Father Land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al. (2025). Through a historically complex and convincing study focusing on the aftermath of Wilhelm Reich’s theory, he unveils the social and political layers behind the Village People song “YMCA” and shows how Trump’s propaganda has appropriated hypermasculine tropes that were characteristic of the gay scene.

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I’ve noted: “Reanimating still life – music is breathing”.

The festival screenings are punctuated by Anne-Laure Zevi’s collection of quotes about music, produced for the fifth anniversary of the festival. Once, I read them all together, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s verses from An die Musik (1918) appeared to me the most challenging and rich. Was Alexandros Pissourios equally fascinated by them? The first words of the poem seem to sum up Pissourios’s 2023 film The English Occupation of Cyprus: “Musik. Atem der Statuen. Vielleicht: / Stille der Bilder. […]” (Music. Breath of the statues. Perhaps: / Silence of the images). The homonymous polka, composed by Dina Mascalchi, reanimates the statues of the Cyprus Museum. It breathes on them together with the natural light that vibrates in the museum through time-lapse images.

Statues in a museum are not (necessarily) the frozen face of history. Music-related objects and musical instruments in a museum are not (necessarily) the frozen face of music. Anna Franceschini’s Nothing Is More Mysterious. A Fact That Is Well Explained (2010) stages minimal camera gestures in order to make the machine of cinema and the machine of music fuse into one movement. Music can be a still life too, and cinema will reanimate it.

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I’ve noted: “Friction with reality – music as ‘thickness in time’”.

Has Johann Sebastian Bach’s most famous music become a still monument? Do we visit it like a museum? Is the philological approach a necessary reanimation of it? In Ken Okiishi’s The Chronicle of A.M. Bach (2024), Jean-Luc Ho’s art bears witness to a new generation of musical interpreters, for whom philology is joined by a freedom rooted in concentration on presence – on the moment of performance itself. The encounter with Ho is actually only one layer of a film that aims to unfold the friction between the complex construction of art and the roughness of reality and daily life. The reference to Straub & Huillet’s homonymous film (1968) and its reflection on structure and the material conditions of production is another layer, which is actually sublimated by a further layer: one in which music resonates through dance improvisation (Gabriel Schenker).

The hypnotic character of musical variations, as in Bach’s Chaconne or Passacaglia, allows Okiishi to extend his sequences of visual roughness across an otherwise unbearable running time. Ruth Baettig sends me her feedback on the phone: “An incredibly profound experience between perfection and imperfection, between the daily effort to reach something divine and the constant failure to do so. Frictions, dissonances, and sublime compositions. A chronicle of the everyday, and at the same time an approach toward something ineffable.”

Is the perfection of some music a vanishing point? On the horizon, it would be an orientating and unreachable point at the same time. (I think of Fabio Cherstich’s Lucia Di Luciano (2026), where the recently deceased – and recently rediscovered – Italian artist seemed to work with music as a never-ending pattern for the transformative process of creativity.) When is the tension between these elements resolved? According to Jean-Luc Ho, there is a special moment of full communication during a musical performance, which he describes as “a thickness in time, a thickness in silence”.

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I’ve noted: “Impossible music – ground of imagination – holes and ellipses”.

A thickness in silence. The curators of the festival had the brilliant idea of screening Artur Zmijewski’s old film The Singing Lesson I (2001), in which the singing of a choir of deaf people is able to embody impossible music. Here, the images become bridges towards a vertiginous place where the entire world weighs on imagination. What if music were (also) this ground of imagination, the ultimate place for perfect sharing?

What does history sound like? Can it also sound like an impossible and imaginative music? We can hear it in the archival work that Dana Iskakova (in collaboration with the artist Saodat Ismailova) has done for Whose Voice Is This? (2024). The history of dubbing in Central Asian cinema in late Soviet times takes the form of an unravelling movement, in which dissolving propaganda leaves room for an elliptical discourse between ambiguous manipulation and sudden spaces of freedom.

Why has Bearing Fruit of Fondness, Grounds of Coherence #2 (2025) been one of my most intriguing film experiences? Probably because Xin Shen’s 16mm black-and-white film is both aesthetically dense and discursively elliptical – a mixture that, for me, is particularly appropriate to the medium of cinema. Connecting East Asia and the northern Isle of Skye, her vocal performance hints at the tension between mutuality and exploitation – and I could not help but connect the liminal perception of her words with the “liminal” voices of the animals on screen.

Happily continuing with ellipses: in Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Chen Zhan, and Mengfan Wang’s Till Ashes Turn into Pines (2025), the use of black screens triggers the perception of a parallel world of afterimages. The sound takes the lead with its continuous line. This aesthetic configuration makes the inner perspective prevail. The film becomes an effective exercise in interiorisation, so that we experience the fragile ecological balance thematised in the film in our bodies. The human and the more-than-human become a seamless surface.

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I’ve noted: “Music as the interiority of film”.

Films have an inner voice. Sometimes, this is a sound or a piece of music that speaks for the structure of the film, for its meaning, for its emotional centre. Diego Marcon’s La gola (2024) is an excellent example of this. A baroque composition for organ often covers the dialogue between the two protagonists, but this choice is apt insofar as it underlines music as the “organic” place where the two antagonistic voices can reunite. Around the theme of gluttony – an occasion for both refinement and perversion – they represent, respectively, desire and decay, celebration and complaint, the sophistication of the mind and the mortality of the body. Through a unique mixture of digital animation and analogue mise-en-scène, music makes us experience the hidden complicity of the two protagonists within one discourse made of ambivalence.

Music can help films in their almost impossible tasks. How can the dignity of the poorest be filmed without voyeurism or miserabilism? After meeting the musician Homero Basílio, Jonathas de Andrade edits his music into Olho da Rua (2022) so that the film’s narrative is emancipated from words and focuses mainly on gestures, while the centre of the film shifts from the sheer exposure of people to both their movements and their inner landscape. A film that could seem artificially composed becomes emotionally realist, exactly as in de Andrade’s Jangadeiros e Canoeiros (2025), whose highly constructed scenes are able to convey spontaneity. In this way, these are not films about political themes, but films that, in their form, favour a political agenda of empowerment and resistance, in which agency is given back to those who have been deprived of it.

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I’ve noted: “Music as a performing body”.

Yes, not the body that performs to music, with music, but music itself as a body that performs—and makes bodies perform. This is the key to reading Camilo Restrepo’s La bouche (2017), a film that tells a story around a piece of music as a ritual process, as a grieving ceremony that should repair social injustice. Music is the body of the film in Mengyun Han’s Dhikr (2926): textile machines and the arabesques connected to Sufi tradition constitute one body of music that connects the history and presence of Uzbek traditions in one hypnotic spiral of transcendence. In her film, Han challenges the philosophical and religious believes beyond this spiral, including the force of silence or the scream of a child.

What if music is a performing body because bodies are the only instruments that make it? I saw Daniel Gurton’s wonderful Spoken Movement Family Honour (2025) from this point of view. I therefore saw the two dancers’ performance as a musical body, the music of their bodies becoming the soul of dance. From this perspective, the extraordinary choreography by Kwame Asafo-Adjei and Catrina Nisbett expresses the topic of domestic violence in an even stronger way. Gurton’s minimalist framing and precise editing decisively enhance the experience of the performance.

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I’ve noted: “Rusty, a loud peak”.

We met him at the bar of “The Dracula’s Ghost Riders Club” – or, I should say, his overwhelming eloquence embraced the bar where we were sipping coffee. After watching Bruce Ashley and Michael Donald’s Blitzed! later that evening, I could appreciate this persona as the driving force behind the changes in pop music and culture in the UK in the Eighties. The recurring “I was the first one to…” at the bar proved to be a matter of fact, not boastfulness. On the contrary, watching this old guy with reading glasses happily DJing later in the night, I felt the humility of the passionate hard worker behind the big mouth. I am not a fan of loud music, but thanks to this Rusty Egan package in St.Moritz – meeting, film, and DJ performance – I grasped the intimate connection between the art world and pop culture, within which this son of David Bowie and Kraftwerk has been a precious link. That is why that loud music turned for me into a moment of joyful celebration. Who cares if someone were to say that there was a hint of nostalgia in that sound of the Eighties? Performed music is never old-fashioned if a certain thickness in time, a certain thickness in silence, occurs.