ZONE

A delicate, episodic adventure, ZONE blends the sweep of a novel, the lyricism of an intimate diary and the rich production values of a widescreen epic. Propelled by a variety of contrapuntal music and a stream-of-consciousness voiceover, the film charts the oneiric journey of a young woman who escapes an oppressive detainment facility to encounter a range of situations, people and emotional states, all waystations in her coming of age.

Adapted by prolific German author Christina Friedrich from her 2021 novel Keller, ZONE possesses the texture of a memoir and the outline of an allegory. The film doesn’t offer us characters and plot as much as an alluring tapestry of recurring objects, gestures, figures and events that, together, evoke an image of a bygone world and the filmmaker’s feelings towards it. The anti-naturalist, Brechtian narrative progresses elliptically, interweaving literary references, dreams and fantasies over starkly varying terrains.

There is no facile poetry in this abstraction, only the inner necessity of a work that is true to itself. A protean film of constant invention and surprise, ZONE presents a bona-fide piece of personal cinema whose mysteries may elude the viewer, but whose hypnotic effects are hard to miss.

– Srikanth Srinivasan