Ingeborg and Adam are visionary hand surgeons who are bound by love, control and irresistible fixations. Ingeborg, for one, feels compelled to steal objects. Adam longs to become one.
But after an accident, their well-choreographed lives suddenly face a force that could upset the careful balance that has long defined their relationship: the enigmatic Gaia. With her arrival, unexpected desires start springing up.
With Objet a, her new mind-bending and visceral feature, Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker Ann Oren (Piaffe) returns to Locarno. It is a stylized cinematic exploration of the fragile relationships between humans, as well as humans and nature. And it is likely to make you look and think at control, desire, intimacy, identity – and kleptomania – in a different way.
Objet a, world-premiering in the international competition of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival on Tuesday, Aug. 11, stars Aenne Schwarz (All Is Well, Every You Every Me) as Ingeborg, Louis Hofmann (All the Light We Cannot See, The Forger, Dark) as Adam, and Simone Bucio (Piaffe, The Ivy) as Gaia. Georg Friedrich (Great Freedom) and Sofia Kokkali (Our Wildest Days) also feature.
“I’m interested in human desire and how it connects us to other species,” Oren says in a director’s note. “The human body is the starting point for my cinematic language: the more control we have over it, the more we separate ourselves from the natural world.”
