The Force of Speechlessness

In Oberhausen, this year, there were many expectations for the most discursive sections of the festival, like the podia, and some were waiting for a substantial change of attitude in handling political issues. They are probably still waiting. Therefore, as a FIPRESCI juror, I am happy to have focussed on the International Competition, in which it was possible to find some films that renewed the festival tradition of aesthetic radicality. I cannot say that it was an easy finding, because many short films, despite being based on brilliant ideas or urgent messages, were lacking courage in developing them through challenging forms, perhaps preferring to deliver a more decent, consensual object. Here, I want to focus on the good side of the experience in Oberhausen, and highlight the need for a political commitment that comes directly from aesthetic radicality. It will never be enough to stress this, in an epoch of the instrumentalization of films to discourses that do not necessarily need a film to behold. Coherent with this assumption, the thread of my selection of short films will be speechlessness, and its wonderful cinematic power. 

I interpret speechlessness, not only literally, as speaking for the discursive ellipses and the formal openness through which communication gives way to expression. An unexpected cut, a particular gesture, a saturated colour, an unsolved dramaturgic line, a non-synchronic sound, are all cinematic elements that put prosody in the centre. Prosody thus becomes “the” medium-specific place for films. Prosody matters, and matters politically. More broadly, speechlessness stands for cinematic efficacity in expression and does not necessarily mean absence of words but the non-relevance of an accomplished discourse, to which a film could become subservient. The most radical is film in prosody, the most effective will be its political content, precisely because it will not be reduced to a political statement. For political militantism, one uses the expression “being vocal”. Putting prosody and speechlessness in the centre, I am just saying that one should take care of the voice in order to “be vocal”, because “being vocal” does not mean to shout louder but, for example, to be able to make a pause, to place the right emphasis, to use facial expressions, etc. Yes, being vocal and being speechless can go together.

With this thread in mind, I will only mention the films that to my eyes embody speechlessness, or “cinematic prosody”. Sepideh Jamshidi Nejad’s Within the Sun is more than an observational piece about the struggle, the working conditions, and the pride of a group of old Iranian women collecting salt in an open mine. The insistence on their repetitive doings lets emerge a Sisyphean, existential motive, one that doubles or enhances the feminist line of the film, and is made stronger by a surprising end that emotionally points out how work can saturate life, for better or for worse. Differing from literal speechlessness is Nina Yuen’s Samantha, in which a rich and nuanced feminist discourse in the voiceover accompanies the entire film in its coping with AI both theoretically and experientially. Even if this film could appear as maximalist in information, the overabundance of words, just as for the equally overabundant quantity of AI generated images, is legitimated by a conscious strategy of saturation, which conveys the feeling of being overwhelmed by societal rules and standards concerning the relationship between women and their image. On the same feminist line, in Darren Dominique Heroux’ Texas Switch the question of the invisibility of average old women allows the switch from documentary characters locked in their own reality to a story of imagination that liberates the women – and the images of the film, otherwise blocked in middle-class apartments – to enter the animistic dream of symbiosis with the other beings in the world (I take advantage of this symbiotic dream to mention two quite mature films, that balance form and content perfectly through a multi-perspective glance on their topics: Gregor Bozic’ Common Pear – that merited a wonderful FIPRESCI Award this year – and Saarlotta Virli’s Memories Move like Distant Islands).

Atmospheric films can work as springboards if they can introduce meaningful ellipses. This is what happens in Ana Aponte and Sol Muñoz’s Nocturne, a minimalist film whose two little protagonists wander freely – and speechlessly – in the nightscape of a suburban area. With their fragility and unclear destination, they challenge the night in a world that we rediscover as obsessed by fear and need of protection. Imprisonment, not chosen but forced, is the setting of Elsa Pennacchio and Etienne De Villars’ Fenêtres, who co-realised the film with the inmates of a jail in the South of France. The yearning for freedom is perfectly expressed through the form of the film, which displays filmmaking as a sort of puppet theatre or shadow play. We feel that every imagination is possible, that film can carry us far away. On the contrary, the form of Lin Htet Aung’s film, A Metamorphosis, is able to convey the suffocating atmosphere of general imprisonment under the Myanmar dictatorship. 

The human traces are evaporated or solidified; a lullaby is sung through the AI modified voice of the dictator himself. In its disquieting speechlessness, this film is genuinely unique, and the discomfort will be engraved in our soul. This is a good example of radicality, when taking risks is paid off through emotional force. I can say the same for Salla Tykkä’s The Will: beside its intelligence and its passionate urgency, the centre of resonance for such films is probably the guts. This is why speechlessness will affect my own writing, because it is hard to say how images of infrastructural ruins and a rock band together can have such a strong impact. We probably learn how irritation can be an organic element of artistic expression.

Speaking of speechlessness, I will end my selection of short films at the 2025 edition of the festival by way of the International Competition, and mention the filmography of a wonderful artist that I consider my greatest discovery of this year: the Swedish-born Susanna Wallin, present in Oberhausen herself and in an interesting dialogue with the novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo. Mostly in her English phase of production, her camera has an incredible ability to be there where life pulsates. Choreographing the images with her characters, and compositing them through a highly dynamic editing, she creates exceptional moments of intensity, making what I called “cinematic prosody” the main tool of her language. A sort of paradigm of speechlessness in film, and probably the most radical-therefore-political proposal of the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen 2025.

Giuseppe Di Salvatore
© FIPRESCI 2025