In 2018, he brought his film Walden, which draws attention to the absurdities of the globalised world, to KVIFF and won the Special Documentary Jury Award. This year Daniel Zimmermann came with the film Spheres, which he dedicated to the deconstruction of the artist’s ego.
He was mainly inspired by the world of performance art. “I’ve been involved in it for fifteen years and I’ve met many inspiring people. During the Covid pandemic, I had time to immerse myself in research and decide which performance artists I was most interested in. I decided for those who try to combine their art with spirituality,” said the Swiss filmmaker, who also described Spheres as a work about finding a way to let go of something that bothers you.
This formally distinctive film examines details of the surroundings as its camera slowly and continuously pans 360°. “We used a camera that rotates around its axis in ten minutes. That’s the optimum speed, if it was rotating faster, you’d get sick watching it,” the director explained. When asked why the shots flow from left to right, Zimmermann replied that this is the direction in which we write and read, and he had already used this direction in Walden.
