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VISIONS DU RÉEL 2017

Apple and Volcano – In Search of What Remains: an extraordinary human adventure

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- With her film, screened in the Helvétiques section of Visions du Réel, Nathalie Oestreicher captures, with extraordinary intensity, the essence of a life that is too short. A priceless gift

Apple and Volcano – In Search of What Remains: an extraordinary human adventure

Apple and Volcano – In Search Of What Remains [+see also:
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by Swiss director Nathalie Oestreicher, which had its world premiere in the Helvétiques section at Visions du Réel, is a film born from the urgency of recording an image on film, that of Fabienne, the gravely ill best friend of the director, who gradually disappears until all that remains is her essence (a smell, a characteristic gesture, the sound of the wind or a birdsong). A digital stamp that is fleeting but extraordinarily strong, and goes straight to our hearts.

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The idea that gave rise to Nathalie Oestreicher’s latest film was to film Fabienne (as she herself requested) at a point when the serious illness afflicting her and advancing undeterred was still not really noticeable. What the protagonist of Apple and Volcano wanted more than anything else was to understand how and what kind of memory of herself she could leave behind for her young children. Clear-headed (mysteriously wise) and full of irony, Fabienne scrutinises the camera, as if it were a kaleidoscope, to find impossible answers and formulate them in a logical way. Using her personal story as a point of departure, Apple and Volcano gradually slides into other stories: that of the director and, as a result, that of her father, who she lost as a child, and her half-brother, who committed suicide when he was a teenager. On paper, Nathalie Oestreicher’s film is undeniably intolerably sad, but what it actually emanates, and what elevates it to a higher level, is its incredible positivity and clarity of mind.

Each story, like a little secret garden with its sprouting buds (nature is omnipresent in the film like a metaphor for an unstoppable but reassuring life cycle) and dry branches, is grafted onto the one preceding it, for better or for worse.

As the mother of the director very eloquently puts it in the film, it is impossible to re-live your life just as it is impossible to re-write a story. All you can do is start a new chapter in it. Apple and Volcano visually encapsulates this concept very well, a concept that is also very dear to Nathalie who, despite finding the thought of not being physically present for her daughters unbearable, is frightened by the thought of becoming a gloomy and heavy memory for them to bear. The concept is absence is just what Nathalie Oestreicher tries to reconstruct here, by turning the camera on real people: on her mother and children, and people who exist in her memory too: her father and brother, whose stories she re-wrote in her own way when she was still a child, and Fabienne, who seems to become a bridge between these two worlds. How can she leave a piece of herself behind for her children? How can she continue to be part of their lives without suffocating them? Aware of the fact that these questions are impossible to answer, the director gradually abandons words, allowing herself to be carried along by her physical sensations of that which surrounds her and awakens painful but real memories within her (the memory of her alcoholic father and a brother who suffered with depression). The director portrays life as an endless uphill climb (the scaling of Vesuvius with her brother as a teenager, and the ascent she now embarks upon up to the point her brother threw himself from) up a snowy mountain on which we leave our footprints behind. The last stage of an ascent that the two friends bravely embarked upon together to give us a visual, sensorial and sonorous portrayal (with a soundtrack by Beni Mosele) that is unsettlingly and magnificently beautiful.

Apple and Volcano – In Search of What Remains was produced by Stella Händler from Freihändler (which is also handling international sales), Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen and RTS.

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(Translated from Italian)

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