Ingeborg and Adam are visionary hand surgeons who are bound by love, control and irresistible fixations. Ingeborg, for one, feels compelled to steal objects. Adam longs to become one.
But after an accident, their well-choreographed lives suddenly face a force that could upset the careful balance that has long defined their relationship: the enigmatic Gaia. With her arrival, unexpected desires start springing up.
With Objet a, her new mind-bending and visceral feature, Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker Ann Oren (Piaffe) returns to Locarno. It is a stylized cinematic exploration of the fragile relationships between humans, as well as humans and nature. And it is likely to make you look and think at control, desire, intimacy, identity – and kleptomania – in a different way.
Objet a, world-premiering in the international competition of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival on Tuesday, Aug. 11, stars Aenne Schwarz (All Is Well, Every You Every Me) as Ingeborg, Louis Hofmann (All the Light We Cannot See, The Forger, Dark) as Adam, and Simone Bucio (Piaffe, The Ivy) as Gaia. Georg Friedrich (Great Freedom) and Sofia Kokkali (Our Wildest Days) also feature.
“I’m interested in human desire and how it connects us to other species,” Oren says in a director’s note. “The human body is the starting point for my cinematic language: the more control we have over it, the more we separate ourselves from the natural world.”
Oren wrote the screenplay for Objet a with Geoffroy Grison. The cinematography is courtesy of Juan Sarmiento G. (The Voice of Hind Rajab, A Poet), with editing by Hansjörg Weißbrich (Rose, Late Shift). The film is produced by Schuldenberg Films in co-production with Tarantula, asterisk* and ERT.
A theatrical release in Germany through Grandfilm is scheduled for the first quarter of 2027. Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired the North American rights. Bendita Film Sales is handling international sales.
Ahead of the Locarno premiere of Objet a, Oren, Schwarz and Hofmann talked to THR about the serious and fun sides of the production, how they collaborated on its choreography and how timely its themes are if you look close enough.
Ann, what gave you the idea for this film and this story?
ANN OREN Several things, but what I was starting with was the sense of touch. I make very visceral films. My first feature film, Piaffe, dealt with the sense of sound. I start with the experience of the human body today in order to understand the human condition today. Here, I was thinking about the sense of touch today and what happens when we touch flat screens more than we touch our lover’s skin. A lot of experiences have flattened down to touching this plexiglass most of the day, so what is happening to our fingertips? I think they’re really deprived, and I was imagining zombie-like, hungry fingers – hungry to touch something. And then I had this idea of a couple that is living a very bubbled life and communicating emotionally through objects.
‘Objet a’ film still, courtesy of Juan Sarmiento G./Schuldenberg Films
I am curious, Aenne and Louis, how Ann pitched this project to you. To me as a viewer, Objet a sometimes felt a bit like a dance choreography that was very body-driven and that I could “feel” physically while watching.
AENNE SCHWARZ When I read the script, I felt a real longing to become part of this genuinely faraway world, which, at the same time, felt somehow familiar. What was very intense was when Ann talked us through the script. I remember when we all met, she had such a precise and full vision of what she wanted. And then, yes, it was a very physical experience. I experienced it like diving in, and at the same time, you had to hold the line and be very straight because they’re such delicate characters.
LOUIS HOFMANN I remember that in our first rehearsal, the term dance popped up quite a few times. The way we moved around one another was, I guess, testing out how near you could be to one another and what distance you could create. I remember that there were only a few moments where the characters would actually touch. But most of the time, it was about playing with the distance between them, creating tension, and playing with that tension.
SCHWARZ Yes. The gaze was part of the tension between us. You never lose each other. But sometimes, you are very far and sometimes much closer. It’s always a thin line holding us together.
HOFMANN And that longing for the touch is, I think, omnipresent, and that created the tension.
Interesting how you both describe this. Now it makes more sense to me why I sometimes felt that you two were almost moving like marionettes. Ann, are you happy if viewers get that sense?
OREN Absolutely, because this is exactly the type of work that I’m doing. I see working with actors as being about a very physical performance. There is also the psychology, but what I’m actually interested in is how the characters make decisions, not rationally, but rather through gut feeling. I look at human beings as the species that they are. In everyday life, it happens to everybody that we are compelled to do something, although we don’t really understand why. And I think it’s very exciting for a viewer to see that in a character and see that things are charged with this kind of tension.
In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, “objet a” is an unattainable object of desire. Aenne, Louis, were you familiar with this term, or did Ann go through some of this theory? Or was it not really that important to understand such concepts?
HOFMANN My girlfriend mentioned it to me. I wasn’t aware of it, but she was. And then during rehearsals, we touched on it a little bit. My character Adam has this desire of wanting to be a desired object for someone else. But then through his journey, he is also developing a sense of what he wants to be for himself. For me, that was a very beautiful journey to go on.
Ann Oren, courtesy of Björn Melhus
AENNE I saw the title and remembered that a long time ago I studied literature, and Lacan was a topic in one seminar. I remember that I was very excited about it, and so I got a little bit into it. A close friend of mine is a Lacanian psychoanalyst. I felt I had a very intense meeting with this “objet a” myself during filming. The film became this object, in a way. I also wanted to touch it. I also wanted to have it, to own it, and it was also slipping away. So for me, it was a very personal experience with the theme.
HOFMANN You mentioned marionettes. I sometimes felt that the way I was being, or we were being directed, I felt so secure and so safe. In Ann’s world that she created, we just kind of obeyed her vision in a very beautiful way. I don’t mean that we had no say in it anymore, because it was quite the opposite. She was still welcoming all of our ideas.
Do you remember any examples?
HOFMANN When I tried to find the character, I very much went through voice. It was an impulse. I’d read somewhere that the soul of a character is placed in the voice, and I’ve never really gone through that, using the voice in particular to create the character. During rehearsals, I was reading Georg [Friedrich]’s part with Aenne, and I was mimicking, for fun, Georg’s [Austrian] accent and dialect. And then Ann was like: “Wait, I love this voice for you.” And I said: “Hang on, I can’t really have Georg’s voice when being in a film with Georg.” But I then took that placement of the voice, where his voice sits. That’s just an example of how playful we were with one another while being in that very safe and secure environment of Ann’s vision.
Ann, as a filmmaker, how do you think about colors? I noticed, or maybe I should say “felt,” colors quite a bit in Objet a…
OREN This is the bread and butter of my language. I don’t even have to sketch it out. It just comes to me. What would be the color palette of the film, and how does that support the mood that I would like to bring across? For this film, I wanted to reduce colors. Actually, we only have natural colors in the film until, slowly, green becomes the guest and the star color in the film. You have to work very hard to reduce color, actually, especially when you’re shooting outside, and then you slowly introduce it. So when you have a sequence in the end, it’s really ecstatic.
So we made sure in the production design and in the costumes that the range was from whites and beiges into the deep browns. The red color was used only in the bedroom … and [in another location] in the background. When I see Adam and Ingeborg within these natural colors, it really makes me think of them a little bit more like animals.
I felt the desire inside, or below the surface, of the couple without the characters having to talk about it. Is there a trick to tap into that to make us viewers sense this desire?
SCHWARZ With Ingeborg, what I thought was very exciting about her was that her fingertips and her eyes are her sensual organs. And I really tried to dive into these sensations. The crutch she [gets for one of her legs as the film unfolds] became part of my body. It was exciting for me to really open to the world that an object can become so strong. And with Gaia, she also has a sense she never had before, and she can’t control it. That is like an earthquake for her. She goes into a direction she never went before, and she can’t understand it.
She basically has things in order. She knows what she wants. She’s very sensitive and delicate, but also very clear in what the object has to do for her. And then this kind of melting starts when her body breaks. When her leg is broken, something breaks into pieces.
‘Objet a’ film still, courtesy of Juan Sarmiento G./Schuldenberg Films
HOFMANN I remember that the objects, the crutch, as well as a corset I use, had an immense effect – not only on us but on the whole team. There was a fascination with the beauty of how they were built, and maybe how we got attached to them. We treated them as extended parts of ourselves, and there was this fascination coming from the team as well.
I also remember us, as actors, acting differently when we had our objects with us. There was more to us, and it was also kind of between us. This film is about these two people who are symbiotic and living their life in a very symbiotic way, doing everything with one another – working together, living together, loving each other – and then there are these new elements popping up that are so disturbing at first, and so irritating, and so frightening. And then they slowly but surely start to go with those impulses, and they don’t really know where they’re coming from.
SCHWARZ One thing that was very special was that this was very playful, and also funny in a way. And that gave us also a lot of freedom. We were having fun. We were laughing.
HOFMANN At first, I wondered, “Is this going to become not body horror, but is it all going to be really dark, scary and just full of doom?” But I felt it was quite endearing, and so sweet, no matter how strange these desires might appear to other people. At the end of the day, they are very endearing, sweet desires. And I found the characters so endearing.
SCHWARZ Yes, there’s a tenderness.
Ann, can you share how you think of rituals as part of your storytelling?
OREN That has a lot to do with obsessions with control. You see that with both of them, especially with Adam’s character. He’s obsessed with controlling his body, developing his body, and then he wants his body to also get attention. But the more control we have over our bodies, the more we are disconnected from the natural world that we are a part of. And I think this is a very contemporary condition.
The need for rituals, historically, first of all, is that they are relaxing. It doesn’t have to be a religious ritual, but it can be about the things that you have to do in the morning or the things that you have to do before you leave the house. I think that the need for it also has to do with forgetting ourselves and connecting with something larger than ourselves. If in the beginning, the characters are connected to controlling their lives and to objects, towards the end, it opens up to a psychedelic experience that is like ecstasy. And ecstasy has always been a need for humankind. Today, there is a renaissance of psychedelics in the world because we’re so controlled – the need to forget ourselves, to have a moment of ego loss, and to connect to something larger than ourselves. I didn’t want to have a didactic experience for the audience, but rather lure them into something through passion.
Speaking of passion, Adam and Ingeborg really try to control that when we first meet them…
OREN I built the sexuality between the couple so that they were canceling parts of their bodies; they’re not including their genitals. It’s all about this exchange of the experience of touching and being touched, but in the most clinical way, which makes it absurd and interesting and a very particular choice for the two of them, which makes them suit each other very well. I think we live so bubbled today, and we’re trying to control everything, and it’s becoming about maximizing the length of your life, but you forget to live your life.
The film starts with thinking about the human condition, our bubbled life, and what, in a way, leads us to the disaster that we are in right now. We’re living in times of war, climate catastrophe and tech fascism, and it starts from that. So, the film is something very fantastical, and I have very particular characters. But it touches on living in the world right now, and I hope that it’s going to resonate and be absorbed this way. I like to work with ambiguity, so I don’t want a person to come out of the film and be able to describe it with one sentence. That would make it rather boring.
