The materiality of life: cat‘s fur on full display, the blowing of leaves in the wind, and the game the shadows play on the wall. The effort of walking with a walker across the courtyard, through the scrubs, but also the constant movement, continuing, not stopping. What accumulates in a house, in a life, and around it. The stories of how high the swallows fly and memories of Italy, the war, and back to today. A birthday cake for his 90th, and conversations that lead to the topic of death without pathos. The ticking of the second hand on several clocks.

The materiality of cinema: the grain of the image, the rattling of the camera, sometimes in the background, the mashing of colors, the shaking of the images, the length of moments that depend on the length of the film reel, and the blackness of the image when creating images isn‘t possible in the moment.

There are so many wonderful things to mention about this film, directed by Ann Carolina Renninger and René Frölke about old farmer Willi and shot on 8 and 16mm spread over a year where not much happens externally. The images and moments, the looks and relationships with people they create. Everything actually, all of the fleeting things that mark the unpredictable light of the day, and the incorporated breaks that prevent the idyll from freezing. It‘s not after beauty. It‘s tracing a very specific idea of cinema by following the traces of a life, a life that may seem small in relation to the world, but big on the screen. Fragments and non-events that add to a mosaic in cinema.

Sebastian Markt

Translation: Elinor Lewy