Debut filmmaker Ramon Zürcher’s 2013 Berlin International Film Festival and New Directors/New Films premiere The Strange Little Cat will screen for an exclusive one-week run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center beginning August 1.
The film centers on siblings Karin and Simon who visit their parents and their little sister Clara. Over the course of the day, the washing machine is repaired, people sit together at the kitchen table, carry out an experiment with orange peel, talk about lungs, and sew on a button that was deliberately torn off. A mother desperately tries not to implode and her youngest daughter who explodes constantly form poles between which sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cats and cousins weave in and around each other in the tight domestic space of a middle-class Berlin flat. Each movement leads to the next, one word following another.
The Film Society said of Zürcher’s feature: “In the hands of masters like Jacques Tati, Lucrecia Martel, and Chantal Akerman, cinema that at first appears to merely observe and record is in fact masking intricately constructed commentaries, built from seemingly mundane experiences. In the case of The Strange Little Cat, an extended family-dinner gathering becomes an exquisitely layered confection ready for writer-director Ramon Zürcher’s razor-sharp slicing… Fans of Béla Tarr and Franz Kafka will find much to love as will devotees of The Berlin School, of which this film represents a third-generation evolution.”
[Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat was produced by his brother Silvan Zürcher, Johanna Bergel, and German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). A KimStim Films release.]
