19/01/2024 - The debut feature from young director Lisa Gertsch talks of the fragility of existence and of the magic that hides in the small and large details of everyday life

Presented in a world premiere at the Solothurn Film Festival in the Visioni competition and vying for the prestigious German award for debut directors First Steps in the feature film category, Electric Fields [+see also:
interview: Lisa Gertsch
film profile] by Lisa Gertsch confronts us with the beauty and mystery of marginal realities populated by characters who are both powerful and fragile, rebelling against a suffocating “normality.” Determined to shake off the weight of rules based on the law of the strongest, the characters who populate Electric Fields impose new standards focused on the acceptance of difference and of fragility, experienced with cathartic intensity.

In the debut feature film from Lisa Gertsch, nothing is as it seems. What we are commonly pushed to consider “reality” is in fact transformed right, before our eyes, into a deceptive and seductive illusion. In the “real” world, the one based on senseless heteropatriarchal rules adopted as if they were a fatality, human beings are driven in an unconscious and perverse way to forget their dreams, abandoning the lightness and spontaneity of childhood. Almost without realising it, we are engulfed into a daily life punctuated by fundamental stages of "becoming adults" until, as is the case in Electric Fields, something goes wrong and the house of cards falls to the ground, leaving us tired and stunned. Lisa Gertsch shows this crumbling of daily life, the electrifying loss of control for indomitable characters who claim their right to live outside the norms.

Whether we follow a man lost in the woods, a light bulb that does not want to go out, a flock of birds that turns into a storm, a corpse resuscitated by a song, or speechless lovers experiencing their last night together, the laws of the world suddenly seem to give way to the utopia of a parallel realities, where one must live intensely a present that promises nothing but the immediacy of being. Electric Fields allows us to walk new paths, to dream, with the characters, of a world where bodies, gestures, human contact and the lightness of the present replace control and apathy. 

Composed of poignantly poetic images exclusively in black and white, Lisa Gertsch's film is imbued with a cathartic humour reminiscent of that of Aki Kaurismäki. The rigour and elegance stylistic of each sequence are in fact enriched by characters who follow their own rules, as though the borders between the legal and the illicit disappeared. Structured in short episodes where each character lives in their own microcosm, Electric Fields allows us to laugh at ourselves, at the absurdity of social rules that block a spontaneity perceived as dangerous. A girl leaves a deserted hotel room after having observed, perhaps for the last time, her lover's naked buttocks; a company manager throws herself out of the window after a job interview in which a childless future employee admits to having taken a sabbatical to take care of herself; or a man disappears underwater after saying goodbye to his houseplants for the last time — this is what awaits us in the amazing world created by Lisa Gertsch.

Electric Fields is a powerful and wonderfully destabilising film that invites us to dream of alternative scenarios, rebellious and free from heteropatriarchal rules that have become dangerously banal. 

Electric Fields was produced by Sabotage Filmkollektiv and Zürcher Hochschule der Künste ZHdK – Departement Darstellende Künste und Film.

(Translated from Italian)