Der Tag

The films of Uli Schüppel do not belong to a fixed discipline. You can’t say that he makes a musical documentary one time and an experimental feature the next. He makes films that repeatedly touch on different domains, and this poetic and essayist film, The Day, is an outspoken example of that. To start with, you can call the film visual. You could also say the film is built on an off-screen spoken text. And you could argue that the music entirely determines the structure and mood of the film. It’s all correct. It’s a textual, visual and musical experiment.
The day in the title is the day that someone dies. Eyewitnesses are asked to describe in detail how this special day passed for them. The day that is ingrained in the memory through the loss of a loved one. The camera follows the story through the places they describe. Empty and poetically photographed places. Places with a story. A story that has now been partly revealed. There are more than 10 stories like this in the film, linked together by the unusual sound and music.
Death was the motivation for the various chapters, yet the film does not seem to be about death. It’s not about life either, but more about something in between. (GjZ)