Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen 2025
[…] Speechlessness stands for cinematic efficacity in expression, and does not mean an absence of words but the non-relevance of an accomplished discourse, to which a film could become subservient.
Dear Duan,
you asked me to bring some news from the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, a festival that apparently needs to keep, restore or – better – relaunch its reputation. You know how its historical political commitment has been ruined, especially last year, by the oversimplifications of a polarised debate that is not a true one. This is probably not just an Oberhausen story but a German story, because I have the impression that the whole political country is blocked in a toxic spiral of declarations without dialogue, where ephemeral boycotts lay themselves open to substantial censorship, with the final result of a generalised self-censorship – purely for the sake of tranquillity. I would have liked to come back with some good news from Oberhausen, for I hoped that the embarrassing situation of last year would have served as a lesson and stimulated a bold change of direction – for example, in hosting an open dialogue on the use and abuse of the word “antisemitism”. In one podium, “Who goes fascist?”, the Israeli moderator Galit Eilat asked this question to a neurologist and a psychologist (?!) – I would have added the subtitle “how to pre-empt politics”…; and in another podium, the moderator Jonathan Guggenberger, who is the leader of the Neukölln Alliance Against Antisemitism, focused on the obsolete theory on ideologies of the pamphleteer Harry Lehmann, who bothered Niklas Luhmann (may he rest in peace) to sell some postmodern liberalism from the Nineties, where politization of art is considered a scandal (?!). Not good news, dear Duan, when one fears going (really) political…
A plea for speechlessness
But let’s turn to the International Competition, which I could follow in its entirety, thanks to my appointment as juror for the FIPRESCI Award. I am convinced that films can sometime be more radical and for this reason more political than podia, and, remaining coherent with this assumption, I will tell you about a selection of short films – the ones I liked the most – that together can exemplify the wonderful power of speechlessness. That is the good news, dear Duan. Yes, in film prosody matters, and matters politically. What does it mean?
I interpret speechlessness as speaking for the discursive ellipses and the formal openness through which communication gives way to expression. An unexpected cut, a particular gesture, a saturated colour, an unsolved dramaturgic line, a non-synchronic sound... these are all cinematic elements that give sense to prosody as the medium-specific place for films. Speechlessness stands for cinematic efficacity in expression, and does not mean an absence of words but the non-relevance of an accomplished discourse, to which a film could become subservient. The most radical a film is in prosody, the most effective its political content will be, precisely because it will not be reduced to a political statement. For political militantism, one uses the expression “being vocal”. Putting prosody and speechlessness in the centre, I am just saying that one should take care of the voice in order to “be vocal”, because “being vocal” does not mean to shout louder but, for example, to be able to create a pause, to employ the right emphasis, to use facial expressions, etc. Yes, being speechless and being vocal can go together.
Here, dear Duan, is my anthology of cinematic speechlessness from Oberhausen:
A song without words for women
Sepideh Jamshidi Nejad’s Within the Sun is more than an observational piece about the struggle, the working conditions, and the pride of a group of old Iranian women collecting salt in an open mine. The insistence on their repetitive doing lets emerge a Sisyphean, existential motive, that is made stronger by a surprising end that emotionally points out how work can saturate life, for better or for worse. Differing from speechless is Nina Yuen’s Samantha, in which a rich and nuanced feminist discourse in the voiceover accompanies the entire film in its coping with AI both theoretically and experientially. It could represent a certain maximalism in information, probably typical of the younger generation – such as in Yuki Buma’s Ms. Understoned, equally interesting for its feminist motives – but for Samantha, the overabundance of words, just as for the equally overabundant quantity of AI generated images, is legitimated by a conscious strategy of saturation, which conveys the feeling of being overwhelmed by societal rules and standards concerning the relationship between women and their image. The climax of this song without words for women is Darren Dominique Heroux’ Texas Switch, where the question of the invisibility of average old women allows the switch from documentary characters locked in their own reality to a story of imagination that liberates the women – and the images of the film, otherwise blocked in middle-class apartments – to enter the animistic dream of symbiosis with the other beings in the world.
Within the Sun | Sapideh Jamshidi Nejad | IRN 2025 | 28’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2025
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Samantha | Nina Yuen | USA 2024 | 8’
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Texas Switch | Darren Dominique Heroux | CAN 2024 | 9’
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Symbiotic Interlude
Speechlessness is an ideal condition for experiencing the continuity between the human and more-than-human domains, and is the occasion to mention two mature films that approach such theme in compositing multiple perspectives. In Saarlotta Virli’s Memories Move like Distant Islands, a scientific and personal perspective superpose in attempting to perceive moving islands, which work as a destabilising agent for experience and knowledge. The film editing creates a prismatic object where memories are simultaneously gathered and scattered. An intriguing temporal multiplicity structures Gregor Bozic’ Common Pear, in which a utopic world that takes serious care of plants constitutes the science-fictional matter that allows us to look differently at our present time with its dramatic climate change. The film expresses this temporal distance through a wonderful photography that plays with different filmic layers: science-fiction, naturalistic and documentary, this last one being analysed as an object.
Common Pear | Gregor Bozic | SLO-UK 2025 | 15’
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Memories Move like Distant Islands | Saarlotta Virri | FIN 2025 | 29’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2025
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A song without words for prisoners
Atmospheric films can work as spring boards if they can introduce meaningful ellipses. This is what happens in Ana Aponte and Sol Muñoz’s Nocturno, a minimalist film whose two little protagonists wander freely in the nightscape of a suburban area. With their fragility and unclear destination, they challenge the night in a world that we rediscover as obsessed by fear and need of protection. An imprisonment, not chosen but forced, is the setting of Elsa Pennacchio and Etienne De Villars’ Les fenêtres, who co-realised the film with the inmates of a jail in the South of France. The yearning for freedom is perfectly expressed through the form of the film, which displays filmmaking as a sort of puppet theatre or shadow play. We feel that every imagination is possible, that film can carry us far away. On the contrary, the form of Lin Htet Aung’s film, A Metamorphosis, is able to convey the suffocating atmosphere of general imprisonment under the Myanmar dictatorship. The human traces are evaporated or solidified; a lullaby is sung through the AI modified voice of the dictator himself. In its disquieting speechlessness, this film is genuinely unique, and the discomfort will be engraved in our soul.
Nocturno | Sol Muñoz, Ana Apontes | ARG 2025 | 14’
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Les fenêtres | Elsa Pennacchio, Etienne De Villars | FR 2024 | 14’
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A Metamorphosis | Lin Htet Aung | MMR 2024 | 16’ | International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025
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The guts
I cannot say that A Metamorphosis is a film that I like, but I have to recognize in it a rare emotional force, a radicality that is highly effective. I can say the same for Salla Tykkä’s The Will: beside its intelligence and its passionate urgency, the centre of resonance for such films are probably the guts. This is why speechlessness will affect my own writing, because it is hard to say how images of infrastructural details, abandoned tools and a rock band together, in The Will, can have such a strong impact. We probably learn how irritation can be an organic element of artistic expression. This leads to my greatest discovery of this edition of the festival, which is Susanna Wallin’s filmography, present in Oberhausen herself and in an interesting dialogue with the novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo. Mainly in her English phase of production, her camera has an incredible ability to be there where life pulsates. Choreographing the images with her characters, and compositing them through a highly dynamic editing, she creates exceptional moments of intensity, making “cinematic prosody” the main tool of her language. Her cinematography will work as a perfect demonstration of what I mean by speechlessness in film.
The Will | Salla Tikkä | FIN 2025 | 28’
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Susanna Wallin’s Website