Souvenir

Tells the story of mushroom pickers who, in the summer and autumn months head, to the southern Carpathians of Romania to begin their search. Far from being a leisure activity, for many of the pickers this is a main source of income which they and their families rely on to get by. In makeshift campsites, they spend months between dense coniferous forests and the Transalpina road, where they sell the gathered mushrooms to passing tourists or people on weekend breaks. The majority of their harvest is taken by intermediaries, who sell the mushrooms abroad for many times the price.

La empresa is a strange creature of a most ambiguous nature: a fiction film about documentary filmmaking as fiction filmmaking, and what it all does to a region’s economy as well as a collective psychology. Or is it? Isn’t it more to the point to say that... But before we get lost here, let’s state what La empresa talks about: how the caminata nocturna, the illegal crossing of the border between Mexico and the United States, was turned into a business that ranges from four-hour night-time tours for tourists out for a sick thrill to reenactments for film and television crews. The latter, of course, is at the core of André Siegers’ casually ironic look at this economy of disaster. When the Germans arrive in town, they meet a workforce already in place and willing to play to any national stereotype – as the French seem to get other kicks out of presenting the caminata nocturna than the Netflix internationals.

A man’s voice from offscreen. He lists individual words, has problems of articulation. At first these are abstract terms, the screen stays black. Sky, street, village and house, however, are accompanied by suitable images. They take us into the speaker’s life. It is his house. These are his automatic shutters. We look into the kitchen where his wife is preparing something. He exercises in a specially equipped room. Later he sits in front of the microphone again, obviously recording his voice to preserve it. Another dimension opens between the recorded words and sentences and beyond the images. There is an inevitability in the room – and a great love. The robot vacuum makes its rounds. Who will put the words stored on the computer into a meaningful context later?