Filmsaaz

The Paléo Festival – with its history, enraptured crowds, protagonists from all walks of life and questions about the future – is the subject of a captivating documentary series by students of the HEAD and the ECAL. Their four capsules, including archival footage, bring the sounds of this essential Swiss institution to life.

In 1778, a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was in exile in Paris: reeling from his mother’s death, he spent his days writing scatalogical music and drowning in libertine excess. In this genre-defying ‘audiovisual opera’, Mozart’s life becomes a portal into that of Wolfgang, an Iranian artist navigating similar extremes as he too is exiled in Paris: the city where everyone says his dreams will come true, and praises him for escaping the censorship of his homeland.

The website of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is crammed with filmed sermons and speeches. Appropriating these official archives, Saleh Kashefi – exiled in Switzerland – has created a political fiction that is both hard-hitting and ambiguous. We bear direct witness to the dictator’s last moments before his downfall, as whispers fill the streets.

Young Iranian director Salef Kashefi creates a poetic diary out of pieces of his life in Paris. Graceful young faces filmed ever so tenderly, the golden radiance of religious paintings, trivialities of a disjointed daily life overtaken by a gnawing sadness… Each shot is a note whose vibrancy is only enhanced by the sound material, as a ghostly double, made of thick silences and repetitive motifs, melodic apparitions and echoes. Development is the translation on film of a melancholy that is sensitively distilled from the bottom of a bathtub. (Claire Lasolle)