SONNENHOF

Switzerland, Netherlands | 2023 | 23 min

Tatjana, the filmmaker, leaves to study abroad and her parents, Dijana and Andreas, find themselves all alone in their large house. Below the surface of a well-to-do, quiet life immersed in the placid Swiss landscape, we perceive the mother’s anxiety and subtle melancholy. The emptiness left by her daughter resounds in a dense silence, where other separations, solitudes, and ghosts are layered. When the gardener Ana, a Serb herself, arrives, she ripples the surface of this apparent calm, giving substance to the roots that Dijana seems to have wanted to forget, including the calls from her mother that she refuses to answer. Against her will, Dijana begins to regain the identity she had left behind, and possibly to reconcile with that original separation. Sonnenhof is a sensitive portrait in which minimal elements carry a bigger burden, an immersion in a complex and impalpable feeling: a daughter’s act of love toward a mother at the moment of parting. (m.m.)

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