Filmmaker-artist Helena Wittmann’s subtly audacious first feature follows friends Theresa, a German, and Josefina, an Argentinian, as they spend a weekend together on the North Sea, taking long walks on the beach and stopping at snack stands. Eventually they separate— Josefina eventually returns to her family in Argentina and Theresa crosses the Atlantic for the Caribbean—and the film gives way to a transfixing and delicate meditation on the poetics of space. Self-consciously evoking the work of Michael Snow and masterfully lensed by Wittmann herself, Drift is by turns cosmic and intimate. 96 mins.
Preceded by: Ada Kaleh (Dir. Helena Wittmann, 2018)
This precisely calibrated domestic diorama alights upon the imagined futures of a group of anonymous young adults. In Helena Wittmann’s warmly rendered feat of formalist filmmaking, questions of time and the realities of space convene in languid interior pans, incremental shifts in light, and the private reflections of her subjects. 14 mins.
Astonishing... confirms both Wittmann’s emotional acuity and formal rigor.
- Phil Coldiron, MUBI Notebook
Beautifully mesmerizing... [Drift's] approach is radical for a feature, jettisoning dialogue and plot, and it is radical too in its depiction of female solitude, a rare subject in art.
- Imogen Sara Smith, Film Comment
Delightfully rebellious... belongs to a microcosm of art-house multisensorial features drawing their inspiration from the unfathomable mysteries of the sea
- Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage
Stirring... Drift slips into a trance state that seems to approximate that of its pioneering heroine, who mutates from a tangible woman to a somnambulant cipher, her presence secondary to the lulling movements of the aquatic expanse before her.
- Carson Lund, Slant Magazine
(Available to download after screening date)