The Shadow of Utopia

he Shadow of Utopia is the final instalment of a trilogy by the filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr, in which the memories of three generations of women form the axis of the narrative. What role does the father play, or Brazil, or sensuality and the body? In stylised images, the narrated puzzle pieces find their counterpart. Sometimes it is a dialogue, sometimes the sound follows the images, more often it is the widening gap that enables a look into the past. Puzzle pieces that find one another, are found, by her, by us as viewers. Anything naturalistic, direct or potentially emotional is shifted. A sound layer that sometimes attaches to the images is present, though in principle it acts autonomously.
Then father isn’t there much. The women are alone. They stand at the ocean’s edge and the wind roars. It is a place in which everything is different than it is at home.