Swiss filmmaking duo follow Kurt Cobain’s afterlife to cheers in Rotterdam
With First Days, Kim Allamand and Michael Karrer achieved the rare goal of creating a highly conceptual experimental film that also seduces a general audience. They spoke to Swissinfo right after the premiere at Rotterdam Film Festival.
At the end of Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005), the Kurt Cobain look-alike character leaves this mortal coil. After a self-inflicted death, the spirit of the legendary rock star seems to escape his body, drifting away into a dimension the camera can’t capture anymore.
This haunting depiction of the grunge icon venturing into the beyond inspired Swiss filmmakers Kim Allamand and Michael Karrer to team up and co-direct their experimental feature film First Days, which is coming hot off the heels of a successful world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).
“We thought the ending of Last Days could be a good departure point for ours,” Allamand, joined by Karrer over Zoom, recalls as IFFR draws to an end. “We wanted to show the first days of spirits in the netherworld, so recalling Van Sant made sense for the premise of our movie. While watching his film, we were left wondering: where is this spirit going?”
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Metamorphosis
But before Nirvana diehards rush out in droves to see their favourite rock star on the big screen again, it should be stressed that they won’t find any physical likeness to Kurt Cobain in First Days at all. Instead, they will encounter two spirits — women of colour played by dancers and movement artists Nasheeka Nedsreal and Jia-Yu Corti — who wordlessly navigate a remote manor and its lush, green surroundings.
Within the metaphysical universe of the film, this inexplicable metamorphosis makes total sense, as the aim of this artistic duo was to depict life after death as a transitory space, where our rules of existence don’t apply anymore. The gentle imagery and layered sounds of First Days make it feel like the viewer is taking in an abstract audiovisual poem, one that doesn’t contain any spoken dialogue.
Unlike a lot of experimental cinema made in a similar vein, First Days deserves praise for never punishing its audience with impenetrable levels of abstraction. It attentively captures tiny movements in faces, bodies, places and spaces with a zen-like, almost Taoist gaze.
“This was actually the main tension we carried in ourselves throughout the entire process of making this film,” Karrer admits when asked about finding a middle ground between experimentation and accessibility. “We like the idea of pushing the boundaries in an audiovisual sense as far as possible, while simultaneously always keeping in mind that we want to invite every member of the audience to be part of this journey.”
Allamand says that, up to the very last moments of the IFFR premiere they weren’t quite sure if they had succeeded in making a film that was both experimental and that would resonate with a broader audience.
“The screening of the film was the moment for us to find out if our ideas worked and our doubts were unjustified. Luckily, the premiere was fantastic. We received a lot of warm and emotional feedback. A filmmaker who also had a film playing at the festival actually said that he was still crying about First Days while he was already in a screening room watching the next film on his schedule! We could have never dreamed of somebody coming up to us like this.”
Bonds of cinephilia
Fittingly, this creative collaboration between Allamand and Karrer all started with a shared dream. The duo first met over a decade ago when they were doing their bachelor and masters degrees at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). They bonded over gems of world cinema and rinsed through the filmographies of global auteurs like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the late Béla Tarr — initiated cinephiles will surely spot First Days’ cheeky reference to The Turin Horse (2011) in the form of a piping hot potato.
Both Allamand and Karrer emerged as rising directors in their own right before they hatched a plan to “find a combined vision” says Karrer, “based off of all the films we watched and talked about amongst the two of us.”
Allamand adds that the initial conceit of First Days was “to make a film together, and to do it quickly. To not wait for funding, to never be bogged down, and just take a tiny crew, jump on a set and shoot a movie.” Ironically, money did unexpectedly come through via the Fast Track Competition launched by the Zurich Film Fund, which supports emerging talents who aspire to films with high artistic merit.
The technical side of spirits
In a gorgeous, somewhat dilapidated-looking house in the remote countryside of France, they found the physical location that would symbolise the spirit realm of First Days. During the twenty or so shooting days, the directors also stayed in the manor, alongside their modest crew and two actresses.
“It was kind of a shock,” Allamand recalls about suddenly standing on set, having to glean as much usable material for the editing process that would soon follow. “All these conceptual notions about spirits and afterlife suddenly turned very technical and practical. It meant we had to remind ourselves to keep looking deeper and find the right imagery that could transport actual deeper feelings and emotions.”
Lead actresses Nedsreal and Corti didn’t have a background in traditional film or theatre acting, meaning they were even better equipped for the conceptual and non-verbal approach Allamand and Karrer had in mind. “It was incredibly fun for us to watch them work with tiny gestures that conveyed much deeper ideas,” Allamand emphasises.
“For us it was a kind of beautiful mystery, because we don’t even know how they prepare or what they are doing.” Karrer adds that “in hindsight, we were surprised how fast they adapted to our process and had trust in our vision. It was a big gift for us.”
Journey into another dimension
Speaking of gifts: the only actual language used in the film is a mysterious opening title that feels like a present to the viewer. It goes:
An ancient tale said: In the first days after death you must enter a house where no words remain. Awaited by a soul and guided to a whole, you wander into the light only to be left behind. Thus the house is never empty and the waiting never ends.
When asked where this intriguing quote actually comes from, Karrer and Allamand slyly suggest that it simply came to them. “We’re pretty sure it existed before us,” they say, speaking almost in riddles. Maybe that’s also what makes this such a distinctive film within Swiss cinema, “as our culture is not one of ancient tales about death or the afterlife,” Allamand agrees.
Using just images, they have managed to convey what spoken words — or simply put, human language — could not. While highly specific, First Days is a universal tale of time, space, movement and loss. On a meta level, it’s a pure reflection on the power of cinema itself, which Karrer and Allamand feel very strongly about. “We always said this to each other,” concludes Karrer, “that cinema itself is a small journey into another dimension.”
Edited by Virginie Mangin & Eduardo Simantob
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