At the end of August, the St. Moritz Art Film Festival (SMAFF) brings together a handful of creators, filmmakers, artists and film lovers to the Engadin valley for a four day cinematic folly.
The collage by John Stezaker is presented as the main theme of this year’s edition of the festival, as the landscape here ceases to be a “given” element and it becomes an extension of the subject.
This year’s edition ‘Becoming Landscape’, focused on an element ‘…beyond mimesis or representation: the landscape as the result of a transformation, of a becoming’. The curatorial selection of Leonardo Bigazzi and Adam Szymczyk presented movies that capture an underlying structure informing the view; a becoming-landscape of the subject and a becoming-subject of the landscape. The festival allows spectators to be confronted with the ideas of the sublime as expressed by Edmund Burke; to experience the culture among a vastness of landscape, where other worries of the everyday seem minor and irrelevant.
Several films screened at the festival dealt with the topic of sustainability and climate change, such as ‘Earth Protectors’ by Anne de Carbuccia, ‘Machines don’t die’ by Eunhee Lee or ‘Iroojrilik’ by Julian Charrière. Others meditated upon the sublime landscape and our place among it, such as ‘Tassili’ by Lydia Ourahmane, ‘Warp’ by Raffaela Naldi Rossano or ‘Not me – A Journey with Not Vital’ by Pascal Hofmann. The programme included works that discuss social, geographical and political crises in Europe like the movie ‘Resto’ by Masbedo collective or Untitled by Deniz Buga. The festival attracts an international spectrum of creators, into a very particular landscape of an actual and metaphorical microclimate, embracing the intensity of the experience of landscape within the cinema seat, as well as much beyond it, among the ungraspable peaks of the Swiss valley.
The St. Moritz film Festival provides a one of a kind opportunity to witness culture in a setting of distant skies interrupted by the harsh peaks of the mountains, that inspire ideas as sublime as their own shadows.
