“Not available” is the most recurring phrase for Yann Keller, a Berlin-based artist, radical in thought, and witness to an alternative world that seems to be dying out in the era of pervasive gentrification. A mysterious pact binds Yann to a faceless presence, attracted by a desire to unlock the secrets of his visionary creative.

(The film has no dialogues)

Director’s note

The style of this film, between creation documentary and experimental cinema, aims to align coherently with the artistic and visionary content of the story told. Both on the visual and narrative levels in fact, the complexity of the character and his relationship with the city in which he lives required the use of various approaches generating a formal code ranging from visual anthropology to research documentary. As can also be inferred at the synoptic level, the filmic narrative does not follow a linear progression, but proceeds by leaps, cross-references and illuminations that leave the viewer free to construct their own associative paths. In this film, the focus on the metropolitan dimension on both the urban and anthropic levels almost take the form of a “Symphonie der Großstadt” (we refer to “Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt,” a 1927 German experimental documentary by Walther Ruttmann), which emerges by counterpoint, as the antithesis and completion of the artistic universe of Yann, the film’s protagonist. Berlin’s iconic locations are rendered unrecognizable by cuts and shots that establish subtle formal connections between the images and multiply the planes of interpretation. Here, then, the strings of Yann’s double bass are associated with abandoned railway lines, the hypnotic spinning of his sonic spheroid connected to the escalators of shopping malls, his chaotic atelier becomes by analogy the metaphor of all peripheral worlds. In this sense, then, the figure of Yann, embodies the genius loci of a city such as Berlin, a crossroads of metropolitan languages but also an urban territory with deep lacerations that not even the pressing gentrification succeeds completely in healing.

Being an artist-musician, the music/sound element plays a central role in this film capable of blending together spatio-temporal environments that constantly intertwine the actions of the main character. Music and diegetic noises merge, often making what is played indistinguishable from what is incidentally recorded. A deliberately hybrid language to attempt a possible depiction of the more inexpressible side of creative processes. The word, almost completely absent in the entire film gives way to a visual rhythm that fills the void and consistent with the symphony atmosphere of the city depicts the metropolis as an alienating and abstract landscape.

The filmic device put in place to enter Yann’s world is carried out through the cadenced appearances of a figure always framed from behind, absorbed in Yann’s vision with which the viewer can identify by immersing himself in the tension of that privileged outpost. This mysterious shadow follows Yann’s movements and actions, spying on them without ever crossing a distance that is like a threshold or a field of psychic energies. Or perhaps it is a metaphor for the double, for that which refracts and can never be grasped, understood. His position, always at the edge of the frame, does not seem to have a judgmental gaze, but on the contrary one of empathetic witness to that marginal world of outcasts, of crazy idealists.

Yann and that shadow are perhaps one and the thought that that world may disappear with the complicity of our indifference begins to hurt.

Stockholm Short Film Festival (2022): Miglior Cortometraggio Documentario

Dubai Indie Festival (2023): Cortometraggio Documentario Sperimentale

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