Colostrum, by Swiss filmmaker Sayaka Mizuno, presented as a world premiere at Visions du Réel in the National Competition, catapults us into a dreamy landscape, amongst the picturesque mountains of Switzerland. Despite this seeming perfection, that beauty that seems unreal, the film immediately shows the reverse of the medal, the pains and sacrifices of those who have chosen to live in close contact with untouched nature. Without falling into miserabilism but instead transforming fatigue into poetry, Sayaka Mizuno captures the everyday life of human beings who live at the rhythm of the mountains.

In the heart of the Swiss mountains, in an alpine pasture embraced by nature of dazzling colours, Pascal takes care of the family farm alone after the death of his father and brother. His days are marked by activities that he carries out with the meticulousness and assiduity of a goldsmith: milking about 30 cows that have by now become part of the family, cutting and putting away the hay, cleaning the stable floor or giving food to the just-born calves. Like every year, his solitude is broken by the arrival of a volunteer who helps him with these tiring daily tasks.

Sayaka Mizuno films one of them, Solène, a thirtysomething who wants to escape the city and spend a month in contact with nature. Solène, who is particularly sensitive to the wellbeing of animals, is immediately drawn to and worried about the cattle that populates Pascal’s farm. Although the latter treats his cows as though they were part of his “clan”, each with her own personality and story, Solène seems at first opposed to the milking of animals, as though even that seemingly banal gesture were in reality the fruit of man’s imposition. Her vision of nature and animals is the result of an eco-feminist vision of the world, of a profound search for truth beyond any form of violence or usury. During this cohabitation period, a suspended moment during which they observe each other before cautiously getting closer, Pascal and Solène find their cruising pace. A sort of tacit compromise between visions of the world that at first seemed hardly compatible, the two characters discover that they have much more in common than they thought, especially when it comes to loving animals. The scene in which Pascal helps a cow give birth to then wean the calf, as if he was becoming its substitute mother, is moving in that sense. This gesture, which for him has almost become banal, transforms without his knowledge into a demonstration that the famous “maternal instinct” has nothing to do with gender and isn’t the appanage of an alleged innate femininity, but rather of human beings as such. Determined to transfer the immune defences of his mother to its offspring, which will protect it in its first months of life, Pascal feeds it with the colostrum, the milk produced after delivery. A kind of metaphor for a nature that frees itself from all stereotypes and binary, this scene shows the farmer in all his majestic fragility and sensibility.

Colostrum is an ode to nature, an anti-conformist portrait of a multi-faceted Switzerland that tries to make the city and the mountains live together, opulence and simplicity in a constant back-and-forth between an eagerness for progress and ancestral traditions. Sayako Mizuno invites us to participate in a moving, poetic and contemplative cinematic journey to the highest peak of a mountain fighting for its own survival.

Colostrum was produced by Beauvoir Films in co-production with RTS Radio Televisione Svizzera. French outfit Stranger Films Sales is handling international sales.