The Drama International Short Film Festival has always defined itself through its celebration of youth and discovery—qualities reflected in all of its competition programmes. Retrospectives, by contrast, are by nature devoted to filmmakers and filmographies that have reached artistic maturity, often presenting early short films as a prism through which to examine their creative beginnings.

The cinema of Helena Wittmann offers us a rare opportunity to bridge these two realities. This is merely one of the many bridges Wittmann builds that define her work. Fortunately for us, she continues to construct them through the short film form, alongside her featurelength work.

Her most recent piece, A Thousand Waves Away (2025), weaves together many of the components that shape the sensorial cinematic experience she offers, engaging all the senses—even that of touch.

And this isn’t the only one of Wittmann’s films that creates the impression it can be touched: in Ada Kaleh (2018), a wall filmed from breathing distance becomes a springboard to contemplate spaces and nations, communities and conflicts. «Space as Νarrative» runs through both her short and feature films—with no anxiety to conform to classical cinematic narrative structures, yet also without fear of integrating voice and human presence—even in her most structural and experimental works, like 21.3°C (2020). Her influences, conscious or not, are openly present: Chantal Akerman, James Benning and Michael Snow are grafted onto her fillms, like in The Wild (2020), bearing fruit in the form of a new German cinematic poetics.

The international festival landscape is in desperate need of works that break both the molds of alternative storytelling and the protocols of the “experimental canon”—and this is where Wittmann’s success lies. Her cinema, though young in spirit, has matured and thrived within this envronment for over a decade. And yet, Wittmann rummaged through drawers and old hard drives, in order to share with the Festival audience two of her earliest short films—works that are now difficult to track down. Not just because they hold interest, but to remind younger filmmakers that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

In 2004, when Wittmann completed her first film, Alles ist Leise, at the age of 22, the German filmmaker Wilhelm Hein wrote a text to accompany his final film: “It’s a long way to get rid of everything, which prevents you to reach your artistic goal, to make films like walking, jumping, sleeping, breathing, all the most natural things in the world. …If it works, there is no way back again.”

We can’t know whether Wittmann had read that text back then, but she seems to already be on that path. In The Swells (2023), it looks as if she walks alone in a red desert. And if we (don’t) look closely, perhaps we’ll glimpse the sea in the distance.

Vassily Bourikas
Programme Curation