The ghost of a former lover lives under Olivia’s bed. Barbara invents fantastic stories to cope with Mauricio’s rejection. Mauricio sinks into the ground with remorse. Ramón develops a deep affection for a talking houseplant that bears Olivia’s features.
This film approaches its thematic core in circles as we are invited to ponder the complexity of human relationships from different perspectives. The twists of glances and emotions of the characters entangled in this round dance are not only reflected in the episodic, cleverly intertwined dramaturgy, but also in the visual design. “Olivia & the Clouds” explores a rich garden of artistic techniques. Figures and places we first encounter as drawings go through transformations and reappear as cardboard collages, watercolours or oil paintings. A multilayered narrative of attraction and revulsion unfolds, revealing new facets of form and content with every change of style. Music light as clouds, brilliant sound design, vibrant colours and not least the occasional digressions towards experimental film enchant us and carry us deep into this surreal story that couldn’t be closer to life.
A tired sun creeps across the horizon for the last time. A cold wind is already blowing over the lake. The migrant birds depart for warmer climes and leave the Nordic natural paradise. Heavy snow showers cover the land with a white coat. The animals condemned to stay – fragile creatures of delicate porcelain – cling to branches, looking for shelter. None of them will escape the frosty grip of the spreading winter. They are observed by a tiny girl, also made of wafer-thin, translucent white ceramics, who is the only one left in the freezing landscape in the end.
Anu-Laura Tuttelberg’s symbolic story is touchingly beautiful and at the same time full of inspiring irritations, because she makes her art run up against the reality of nature. She did not animate her puppets in a warm studio but exposed them to the elements, on location in northern Estonia and an island in the Norwegian Sea. In her film, cruel forces, disturbing fragility and the renewing force of the cold meet – ambivalently and elegantly.
“There was a body that didn’t want to be human. It didn’t know it belonged to someone. To me.” María Cristina Pérez González opens her film with these poetic and cryptic words, diving deep into the visually powerful, hand-painted animation. Associative rather than narrative, the sad voice pulls us into a maelstrom of remembered fragments that all revolve around the protagonist’s body: A voluminous shape that sometimes eats itself with loathing, stretches until it fills the frame or cowers like a pea – in the blackness of the fluid, generous brushstrokes, but above all in its own fleshy self.
There is the estranged sister who once called the feet of this body ugly. The good friend who disappeared without a farewell. The father who once said that all unhappy women grow fat. And most of all there is this nameless figure that lives in her belly and feeds her depression with a cute grin. As so often in life, the only path to contentment is reconciliation. With the sister, of course, but above all with her own body which does not fit into narrow social norms – but is the only one she has. And with which she can dance, jump, and even laugh quite splendidly once she understands that it is not a monster to be fought.
