The legacy: grandfather’s collection of bird’s eggs. 4,500 graceful, fragile works of art created by nature; speckled, elongated, pastel-coloured… An orderly confined enclosure of uniform boxes houses the preserved cocoons of the stolen, thwarted offspring of birds of prey and non-predatory birds, from Norway to South Africa. With the legacy comes the story of the collector: Josef Schreiber from Vorarlberg, Central Europe – a middle-class, white, male biography of the 20th century in which order was lost, slipped, had to be reimagined, both on the grand scale and on the smallest private level. Claudia Larcher’s extraordinary essay film is an unflustered tale of restlessness. Personal photos, views of collection pieces and small AI-generated miniatures are overlaid by electronic sounds that seem to communicate with the algorithms of the shell patterns, and a spoken line of thought that traces, sorts and keeps together almost 100 years of change with breathtaking clarity.

André Eckardt

The first voice belongs to the director, asking himself what sort of film he would make about the middle class. What we see is more or less what he describes, split screen combinations of archive footage and shots from now showing unspectacular snippets of daily life: family get-togethers, his neighbourhood park. He talks about shifting the focus of the film too, which is also what happens, as more voices arrive and different formats keep moving between the two screens: the man listing mundane everyday objects; the woman separated from San José by an invisible line; the Venezuelan immigrant who talks of the bus as the great leveller; the granddaughter who inherits a vast encyclopaedia collection. Their backgrounds differ, but they all reference class either explicitly or implicitly, for each person a different category at a different time, so many meanings, so many objects and references, one term of countless shapes. When you open the termite mound, you see it’s been made by them all.

James Lattimer