IMPASSENGER

The first shot shows reflections on the water — a vague glistening in the night. Immediately thereafter is a take of a woman tentatively clasping her handbag. She seems strangely alienated, homeless. The gestures are what begins to speak in the distorting mirror of a diffused emotional state. The camera´s gaze remains fixated on this protagonist whose own gaze is turned inward. In longer, in between takes, a snow-covered landscape shifts into the image - powerful trees with the wind blowing through them - a sublime-cerebral tableau. Broad wafts of mist become caught on the roots and crystalize in iced-over boughs. Within the montage, these become projection surfaces for paranoia and isolation — time itself seems to freeze here. Also the sound is eerily enraptured: acoustic fragments flash, alternate with total silence. Chaotic traffic sounds continually flare up, to then immediately ebb away again.

Through diverse processes of doubling, reflection, and variation, the film leads us continually deeper into the fearful states of a shadow being that seems to float oddly on the surface while its emotional life is cast back into the distorting mirror of the surroundings. Ben Pointeker´s IMPASSENGER describes an emotional resonance space and in doing so, allows cinema to become haptic. Crystalline time-images formulate to a tactile alphabet between introspective landscape and externalized emotionality. At the same time, he newly explores the relationship of proximity and distance, and lets the object of the investigation ultimately congeal to subject. (Shilla Strelka)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt


A cinematic poem shrouded in shadow and mist. An image of water whose surface reflects the surrounding light. The hands of a woman holding a purse in the gloom of a city street. A snow-covered mountain landscape with massive trees reached by a cable lift. Through the sensitive composition of the film, these seemingly banal images begin to speak and reveal an inner world, an inward dream landscape of anxiety, alienation, isolation, and desire. Entrancing poetry relies on a delicate grasp but it’s impossible to resist its inner magic.
(Hubert Poul, Karlovy Vary Int. Film Festival 2017)