Journey of Shadows

A couple live an obsessively ordered life, together with a monkey and an anglerfish. They go through their daily rituals of together-life – like synchronised swimming, but are sleeping separately – until one of them decides it’s time to die, and the other, remorseful and guilt-ridden, takes off on a journey of self-discovery to an unknown island. Rather than find solace in their odyssey, they gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive. There are no boundaries to Swiss multi-media artist Yves Netzhammer’s working practice. He is as comfortable producing his intricate, universally acclaimed shorts as he is creating a chocolate-scented stamp for the Swiss postal service. But at the heart of all his work lies his consummate skill at line drawing, even when he employs state-of-the-art architecture software programmes to realise his often eerie, artificial-feeling surreal tales of human foible and failure. Netzhammer is a master at finding meaning at the intersection between form and story: neither on its own says it all, yet the interplay between them opens up a whole cosmos of ideas and visions to the viewer. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)