A Portrait of director Ann Oren

A woman growing a horse’s tail who creates sound effects for a film. Simone Bucio plays this mysterious woman in Ann Oren’s debut feature film, PIAFFE. It premiered at Locarno Film Festival and subsequently created a stir at many other festivals. The Berlin-based director is sure to garner significant attention once again with her new work, OBJET A. This latest film, equally enigmatic and poetic, explores themes such as obsessions and fetishism, combining a mystery drama with an artfully exaggerated visual language in which the boundaries between the fine arts and cinema are blurred. OBJET A is also celebrating its world premiere in the competition section of this year’s Locarno Film Festival. A stroke of luck, says Ann Oren. “Locarno is a festival for cinephiles. It has a very diverse and exciting programme that truly celebrates the art of cinema,” says the 46-year-old.

In OBJET A, Ann Oren tells the story of Ingeborg and Adam, played by Aenne Schwarz and Louis Hoffman; a couple both in their private lives and at work. As acclaimed hand surgeons, they like to have complete control. She loves stealing objects, and he loves being her object. When she is forced to rest her leg following an accident, she accepts help from a mysterious young woman called Gaia (Simone Bucio). Whilst Ingeborg develops new obsessions, Adam sets out in search of an object of his own.

In 2023, the project took part in the “Alliance 4 Development” programme in Locarno and the FIDLab at FIDMarseille. Filming for this international co-production took place in Germany and Luxembourg. Ann Oren again shot the work on Super 16 mm: “It supports my visceral filmmaking, so I’m kind of addicted to this image quality. I don’t shoot a million different angles: I decide where it’s going, and that’s how it’s going to be shot. And also, with my precise actors, I didn’t need so many takes.”

The director thinks in images from the very start, even whilst she’s writing the screenplay. No wonder, given that she not only studied film at the School of Arts in New York, but also completed her Master’s in Fine Arts there. She had arrived in New York on a scholarship and stayed there for 15 years. “I had no experience and learnt everything there. We had to make a lot of short films,” she explains. She wanted to continue to explore her interest in the visual arts – which had always run parallel to her film work – through the Master’s programme. “I was working with video, making animations and video installations.” There followed exhibitions and screen­ings at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz and at Kindl – Zen­trum für zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin.

An artist residency took her to Künstlerhaus Bethanien and thus to Berlin, where she has been living and working since 2015. She says it was easy to find partners for artistic projects in Berlin, where she has made short films, video diaries and documentaries. Ann Oren’s work often explores the boundaries between plants, animals and humans – underlying this is the question of what it means today to be a human being: filled with longing, alienated from one’s own body – in a world permeated by the digital. It is a theme that obviously resonates particularly strongly with young people. She believes that audiences have a need for unusual imagery and distinctive narrative styles – “especially young people, who have grown up with TikTok and Netflix. They are thirsty for a certain amount of ambiguity.” She wants to spark the audience’s imagination, to “tickle” it, “so that they can fantasize”.

She cites filmmakers such as the Czech ‘film poet’ Jan Švankmajer and the American avant-garde director Maya Deren as her role models, as well as Fellini and Buñuel. The extraordinary images take shape within her as she writes, though her writing is always preceded by a great deal of research. “Through filmmaking, I’m constantly discovering new things, including within myself,” says the artist. That’s what she loves about her profession. She draws inspiration from her immediate environment, for example when travelling on the Berlin underground: “Inevitably, I soak up the everyday world around me, city life, and from there I can start to imagine scenes.”

Marion Meyer