ARCHIVE FEVER
(2026)
Archive Fever is a personal engagement with memory and transience, with the fear of losing something,
and with the urge to hold on to everything, an urge that prevents truly living in the moment.
The film doesn't answer its central question, it embodies it: when does documentation replace living?
STILL’S
Archive Fever follows an artificial figure, a persona with a long black wig and white face makeup, who moves through landscapes for a whole summer, continuously staging themselves within them. Again and again, the figure returns to a calm, meditative pose by the water, rests in a candlelit bathtub, or moves through forest and meadow. A recurring fisheye lens turns each of these spaces into a circular frame, an eye within the image, a reminder that nothing here remains unfilmed.
As the film progresses, this calm increasingly comes undone. The editing accelerates, the images grow more restless: two overlaid video layers let two versions of the same body appear within a single frame, ghostly hands reach into the image from every side, and an overhead shot shows a body lying flat in the grass, almost like a piece of evidence.
As the film progresses, this calm increasingly comes undone. The editing accelerates, the images grow more restless: two overlaid video layers let two versions of the same body appear within a single frame, ghostly hands reach into the image from every side, and an overhead shot shows a body lying flat in the grass, almost like a piece of evidence.