Filmstill from "What remains" by Elenya Bannert, camera: Tilmann Rödiger (© Elenya Bannert)
What remains is a portrait of a patch of earth.
What remains is the sound of this landscape.
What remains is the telling of a story.
In her cinematic narrative, Elenya Bannert deals with age, forgetting, the demands of our times and a life that is so rare to find.
Matteo is old, he lives alone on an alpine pasture. Not all alone, his cow reminds him from time to time to be milked. It is difficult for him to read and otherwise Matteo is a little forgetful and strange.
The final filming started in March 2017. The idyllic village of Soglio in the canton of Graubünden/Switzerland served as the setting for the story.
In order to be able to deal equally with image, sound and narration, the film rejects acting and narrates from the daughter's point of view so that the storytelling comes to the fore. The consequent film material comes across as atmospheric and documentary and helps the viewer to deal with their own imaginations.
Elenya Bannert was born in Pforzheim and studied scenography and media art at Karlsruhe University of Design. She completed her studies with Heike Schuppelius, Razvan Radulescu and Omer Fast. In 2017 she received funding from the Riemschneider Foundation for her diploma film project.
She designed the scenography and costumes for several short film projects and created live video projections for concerts and events, thus gradually drawing her interest to media art and film.
She works in film production in many ways: in the creative area of scenography, behind the camera as well as the manager. Her path led her to Norway and Estonia, where she developed further documentaries and essay films in collaboration with artists.
In 2015 she produced her first animated film Auf nach Afrika, which was shown in several cinemas across Germany as part of HfG Karlsruhe’s “Wanderings” film program.
She depicts her prose in a refreshingly purist way and focuses her film art on the magic of the decelerated moment, thus developing her own narrative style.