Outside, the temperatures have dropped below freezing and there’s a thick coat of snow on the Swiss Alps, but inside the legendary Dracula Club, things are just heating up. An array of international artists and filmmakers are gathered for the award ceremony of the third St Moritz Art Film Festival (SMAFF), hoping to pick up a trophy – a pile of cow poo, cast in bronze by Swiss artist Not Vital – for the best experimental film, full-length feature, or the jury’s ‘love at first sight’. The celebrations will go on late into the night.
First hosted in 2022, SMAFF was envisioned by the architect and curator Stefano Rabolli Pansera. He was fascinated by the idea that a film festival, in its purest form, is a “beam of light [with] the force of gravity to attract people from all over the world,” he tells Dazed between films at the plush Scala Cinema. “It is ultimately a territorial project.” The territory it covers is broad, too, with curators fielding film applications – 1,756 this year alone – from artists and filmmakers all over the world, spanning the UK, Europe, and the US, Mongolia, India, Lebanon, Iran, Argentina, and more.
Róisín Tapponi, the Assyrian Iraqi and Irish writer, plus founder of Shasha Movies and Habibi Collective, joined the curatorial team for this year’s edition, titled Meanwhile Histories and themed around time. For her, one of the main draws of the festival is its unique and intimate structure, which caters to real film lovers, rather than an audience of big film industry players. “The biggest joy of film festivals is watching films,” she says. “That’s purely the focus of this.”
The festival is far from “provincial” in its ambitions, adds Stefano, but it is small, partly because it has to be: St Moritz is little more than a village in the middle of the Alps. The Scala has a slide and a James Turrell-decorated bar, but only one screen, with 108 seats (such glitzy surroundings can be slightly ironic, notes one nameless filmmaker over dinner, after a screening of a documentary on radical class conflict). The small scale works to its advantage, though, because it means there’s no obligation to fill 2,000 seats. This leaves a lot of room for freedom and experimentation.
In fact, Stefano describes the curation process as an “act of resistance against entertainment”. OK, this might conjure an image of bloated art films that feel about as exciting as watching paint dry, but what it really means is that the festival isn’t afraid to disturb or provoke (see: Paul McCarthy’s scatological closer, starring eroticised AI facsimiles of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun – it doesn’t get much more provocative than that). Tapponi has plenty of experience with the political side of this conversation, facing censorship for her platforming of Palestinian films after October 7. But at SMAFF, she says: “There’s the freedom to show whatever we want to show.”
Below, we’ve gathered ten highlights from the 2024 iteration of St Moritz Art Film Festival.
We rarely think about sirens until we’re already deep in a state of emergency. The Spanish-born, London-based artist Aura Satz places these preemptive technologies in the spotlight, investigating their role in a modern world plagued by endless emergencies, interconnecting crises, and increasing alarm fatigue. Against a backdrop of sublime drone shots and newly-imagined siren sounds – composed by the likes of Kode9, Moor Mother, Laurie Spiegel, and Debit – the filmmaker explores sirens as warning systems for natural and manmade disasters, but also tools of colonial domination and state suppression. On a more existential scale, she asks: what use is a siren against slow, incalculable processes like ecological collapse? Dark and deeply insightful, the film is an urgent warning in and of itself, and rightfully picked up a bronze cow pat at this year’s festival.
In the second entry of his planned seven-film series taking titles from days of the week, the Korean director Young-Jun Tak places two polar opposites in direct opposition: the “hyper-femininity” of a gay male dance group, staging a take on Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 ballet Manon in a Berlin forest and notorious cruising site, and the “hyper-masculinity” of Easter celebrations by Spanish Legion soldiers based in Malaga, lifting a crucifix into the air. Selected for the ‘Love at First Sight’ award, Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday uses these sensual performances to explore questions about gender, sexuality, and the forms they take in the midst of a public spectacle.
Sparked by a series of student occupation protests, the burst of civil unrest that saw barricades block Paris streets in May 1968 continues to resonate to this day. The iconic French-American photographer and filmmaker Michel Auder was there to capture it, but lost the footage shortly after. Ten years later, he would return to the site of the demonstrations to interview some of those that took part, finally resulting – after a 45-year wait – in the footage we see today, in May ‘68 in ‘78. What’s most striking about the film is not the introduction (which sees Jean Tinguely recall an erotic scene between two male elephants at Amsterdam zoo) but the multifaceted sense it gives of a revolution that was, depending how you look at it, a social and cultural turning point or a farcical piece of political theatre.
Martine Syms’ SHE MAD is an ongoing video series, and S1:E4 is just one, darkly comic episode. In it, graphic designer Martine experiences a flashback to T-Zone, a week-long summer camp from her childhood, where teenage girls are coached in self-confidence by a flamboyant supermodel and business mogul. With a visual style and patterns of speech lifted from US reality shows, the camp degenerates into chaos as the leader segregates the girls based on their race, and encourages them to yell offensive stereotypes at each other in a misguided attempt at fostering solidarity. It’s not every day that a work of ‘capital A’ Art has a cinema full of viewers laughing out loud.
Argentine filmmaker Eduardo Williams took home the third SMAFF award (best short and experimental film) for Parsi, which sets a trancelike poem by Mariano Blatt to 360-degree footage by young people from Guinea-Bissau’s queer and trans community. His second film in the programme, Pude ver un Puma, proved equally captivating, following a group of young boys from the rooftops of their home neighbourhood, through an otherworldly landscape, into the depths of the earth, sharing spontaneous stories and pondering philosophical questions as they go.
Britain’s history of colonial violence is still very much alive at the heart of many museum collections. Concentrating on a vast collection of (presumably looted) artefacts at Manchester Museum, artist and filmmaker Ero Sevan explores conversations on restitution and repatriation, interviewing curators and community activists alongside a creative intervention by Manchester-born artist and poet Rochá Dawkins. Together, they share ideas about unearthing the lost stories behind these artefacts and everyday objects – many of them hidden in underground archives – through community participation, in an effort to bring their lost histories to light.
Let’s just get this out of the way: Olmo Schnabel is the son of famed artist Julian Schnabel. That might explain how he snagged the likes of Willem Dafoe and Peter Sarsgaard for his debut feature, or maybe not! Either way, the polarising film – one of the more straightforward narrative rides at SMAFF – is an intense, violent, vaguely incestuous, and occasionally tender watch, following a young man named Alejandro as he arrives in New York attempting to escape his traumatic past in Mexico. Eventually he meets another boy, Jack, who he seduces and draws into his criminal lifestyle, via strip clubs, group sex, shady drug deals, and a high octane finale.
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The titular Eileen Gray in E for Eileen was a real, relatively-unknown but hugely influential architect in mid-century France, back when many women still couldn’t officially call themselves architects. The film charts her final day and night in E-1027, a Modernist villa she designed on the French Riviera, which is interrupted by the surprise arrival of old friends and lovers. Not much is known about her reasons for leaving the house behind, and filmmakers Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly write into this void, using fiction to fill in the gaps in documented history. More specifically, they explore her motivations against the backdrop of her tangled relationship with Jean Badovici and another woman, at a time when queer relationships represented yet another act of radical subversion. The film itself is beautiful (obviously), shot on site in the real house after decades of uncanny tragedies and twisted sagas that have cemented its place – and Eileen’s – in French architectural history.
Before the Great British Britpop plot, there was Robert Rauschenberg’s Grand Prize win at the Venice Biennale in 1964. Taking Venice uncovers the real story behind the successful conspiracy to ‘steal’ the award by the US government and high-placed art world insiders, with commentary from people who were really involved. On the one hand, it’s an interesting examination of how an artist can become intertwined with plots of politics and power; on the other, it’s just a fun story with some surprise twists and turns. It’s part art doc, part true crime saga, part heist thriller (where the prize is cultural reputation, rather than priceless jewels or the contents of a bank vault).
Paul McCarthy was selected to close the festival this year, with two provocative films that explore the unsettling, uncanny, and obfuscating effects of AI. The longer of the two, HEDEIHEID, tasks the viewer with sitting through more than an hour of abstract mutations against an idyllic mountain backdrop: young women, father and grandfather figures, dogs, goats, and more appear and disappear in various states of undress, set to a jarring reading from Heidi, an iconic work of children’s fiction set in the Swiss Alps. Or, as McCarthy puts it in his artist statement: “joyful entanglement with goats penis vagina cheese wheel Swiss hut hat goat herd on hard goats petting prompt porn.” Hardly a flattering tribute to the host country’s heritage.
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