Filmmaker in focus: virgil vernier

Mercuriales

Saturday | 12 oct | 6.30 pm | werkstattkino

Mysterious and soulful, Virgil Vernier’s debut fiction feature has its eyes on the night skies and its feet firmly planted on concrete. Somewhere in a Paris banlieue backcountry of brutalist housing projects, two young women, Lisa and Joane, strike up a friendship and wonder about their futures. Vernier maps out the women’s psychological landscape with close attention to the shared space of hanging out and the momentary pressure points when their ideas about the world bump up against reality. (Nicolas Rapold, Film Comment)

Sophia Antipolis

Saturday 12 oct | 9.00 pm | Filmmuseum

Vernier’s attention to the surreal in the everyday and the mythological in the trivial results in a disquieting psycho-geographic portrait of the obscure, seamy side of modern capitalism, where prophetic visions and wandering ghosts thrive without resolution.
“Sophia Antipolis proves that there are new voices out there experimenting with form, narrative and character, and finding new ways to address the political turbulence of the world, on the level of everyday experience.” (Jonathan Romney, Sight & Sound)

Sapphire Crystal

Saturday 12 oct | 9.00 pm | Filmmuseum

Nightclub debates, girls from the East and contemporary totems paint a portrait of luxury and vanity that echoes the progress of a decidedly unique body of work. (Antoine Thirion, Locarno Film Festival)

Virgil Vernier born 1976 in Paris. Studied philosophy and art. After first documentaries he started his celebrated series with films between document and fiction, whose documentary content does not seem to be from this time or from this world. As if under a burning glass, the uncanny oddities of the world reveal themselves as socially critically anchored science fiction, captured in the sublime beauty of the 16mm material.