Tuvalu

Veit Helmer, who has won prizes with several short films, made his first feature with Tuvalu. It is a fascinating mixture of quotes from film history: the fanciful of Meliès, the poetry of Vigo, the humour of Buster Keaton and the grotesque of Jeunet & Caro are brought together in a fairy-tale told with great visual flair. Anton is a bath attendant in a swimming pool on the decline; the machinery needs replacing, there are hardly any visitors. But he wants to maintain the illusion for his blind father that the swimming pool is still a glorious sight to behold. He brings together bizarre bathing guests and manages to mislead the inspectors with a trick. In the meantime, his brother wants to demolish it as soon as possible to make way for a modern, futurist construction. Anton is not able to save the baths, but he does manage to win the heart of Eva, a visitor to the baths who also dreams of distant seas and oceans, as he does. The world created by Helmer is enchanting. The location itself is fantastic: the old bathhouse in Sofia, a baroque construction with countless corridors and niches, where eccentric guests seek amusement. The black & white film material is coloured with maritime tints: sepia, green, blue and yellow. It is a world not of this time, filled with melancholy, with the awareness of the transitory nature of dreams, beauty and illusions.