Haelgung - Rea

A postmodern Swiss-Tyrolean ensemble ventures into remote mountainous regions, embracing the sonorous variety of local vernaculars. A poetic road movie with stunning shots and an emphatic approach to a new alpine aesthetics.

Mike and Jeanne get to know each other, meet family and friends, touch each other, sleep together, go on holiday together, celebrate birthdays and say "I love you". What complicates things between them: their relationship is based on a contract of 14 clauses that are supposed to define all areas of being together. A small video camera is their constant companion.

Borametz—half plant, half animal—a hybrid of the incurable vegetable lamb, firmly rooted to the ground as a four-legged plant, complaining about nature—what does it want to tell us, standing there in the drizzling rain, inconsolable and indignant, as it speaks for the last time?

In SUNSPOTS, several 16mm shots of the sun are layered and superimposed, paired with a soundscape consisting of volcanos, fire, plastic and the audible solar sounds recorded by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

In July 2022, a forest fire broke out on Monte Gambarogno in Ticino, Switzerland. Wound Edges is my emotional response to this landscape, filmed on 16mm and hand-developed with the forest’s ashes. Each frame carries physical traces of the land’s memory, blending destruction with resilience. The soundscape—field recordings, burned wood, contact microphones on trees, and the presence of fire—echoes the forest’s wounds. A reflection on human impact, impermanence, and the haunting beauty of transformation.

"Our Ears Are In Excellent Condition" is a live concert film with a focus on the experience of listening.

The „Haelgung“ films are charmingly impressionistic diary entries, crafted as mini homages to my closest friends, captured with a delightful lack of planning or structure and edited in camera.

A contemplative and musical journey which takes us along the Rhine and through the Alsatian countryside.

Hand-processed, in-camera edited 16 mm footage of a desolated Italian beach meets four poems by Jeannette Hunziker, evoking loss, memory, and the unsettling stillness of a space caught between land and sea.

A recurring drone changes and reshapes the land and sea.

An audiovisual documentation about an urban recreation area. Slowly the view moves through the forest. Except for some small hints, the visual level creates the feeling of moving in the middle of nature. The difference between sound and image becomes more and more noticeable. The sequences thus comment on the gap between the human idea of nature and the actual, artificial appearance of the forest.

“Here are some Images” is an short film exploring the interplay between internal and external images, using hand-processed 16mm footage and musings on perception and memory.

In "Mitzukos Dream" you watch sleeping people, each filmed for one night with a willdlife camera that reacts to movement. So only the active parts of sleep were captured on film - the moments when we dream?

A flickering diary of time, memory, and erosion, «Things Many Eyes Have Seen» unfolds over a month on an island. Hand-processed in salty seawater, its 16mm images dissolve and transform. The landscape flashes by in broken frames of light and shadow, as if the world itself was stuttering between memory and motion. A meditation on seeing and being seen, the film lingers like a fading dream, where observer and landscape blur into one.

On Lanzarote — an island that is little more than solidified fire — a hand-built lens turns toward black lava fields, ash and mineral light. The 16mm is developed on the island and reworked through double exposure, chemical alterations and contact printing experiments. Beneath the images runs a composition of the filmmaker's own, drawn from lava stones and ceramic flutes. Its title taken from Lorine Niedecker's Lake Superior — "In every part of every living thing is stuff that once was rock / In blood the minerals of the rock" — the film follows that single thought to its conclusion: that flesh, breath and eye are made of the same slow mineral time as the ground beneath them.