Can This Colour Be Here?
New films by Laida Lertxundi, Lucas Kane, Maria Oblicka & Alexander C. Trigg, and Viktoria Schmid
Thirza Wakefield
Películas
Director LAIDA LERTXUNDI
Year
2025
Country SPAIN
Jacob’s House
Director LUCAS KANE
Year
2025
Country
USA
Utkane (Woven)
Director
MARIA OBLICKA & ALEXANDER C. TRIGG
Year
2026
Country POLAND
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Rojo Žalia Blau
Director
VIKTORIA SCHMID
Year
2025
Country AUSTRIA
If we want to understand how Rojo Žalia Blau was made, some of the information we need is shown to us at the film’s opening. Colour filters rinse the title card first red, then green, then blue, rehearsing the processes of exposure that gave the film’s natural images their startlingly unnatural colour. Each of the scenes in Viktoria Schmid’s film was recorded three times, in quick succession, on a single strip of film. With each passage through the camera, these lengths of colour negative film were exposed through a different colour filter. As such, these filmstrips capture three stretches of time that were once joined end-to-end, elapsing as one continuous moment somewhere in western Lithuania, Lower Austria, or Spain. When projected, these units of time play simultaneously. What we get, then, are lively dioramas; images that jog, flutter, and bulge with two species of movement: the movement in the scene and the movement of combination.
As clues, keys, and map legends go, the trichromatic title card passes too quickly to help the viewer decipher the film’s effects. But it’s no great matter, and no failing. On the contrary, the charisma of Schmid’s pictures hinges on our not understanding fully how they acquired their enchantments; how these coastal and arboreal scenes took on the colours of Millefiori glass. Puzzling it out is an important part of the experience of sitting with Schmid’s film. Viewers unfamiliar with colour separation techniques will seek nearer explanations for the bands of candy colour that streak fields of stiffened snow, for the tree trunks wrapped like maypoles. The mind leafs through its Rolodex of related images and fastens on printer inks, 3D centrefolds, and anaglyph lenses with cardboard frames. Making familiar sense of what is photographic logic (or photographic magic), it is likely that most viewers will be put in mind of church architecture and stained-glass windows spilling colour over stone. Contextualising the radical colouration of Schmid’s images in this way lends the film’s exterior settings the appearance of interiors, irradiated from above by light from stained-glass windows. But rather than softening masonry with pebbly mosaics of colour, this film’s borrowed iridescence softens what is already soft, blotting jewel-toned colour onto living and sinuous forms: bark, fern, surf, cloud.
Medieval-period stained-glass windows were cut and painted in accordance with—and eventually assembled upon—a scaled-up design called a vidimus, which translates from the Latin as “we have seen.” No such plan guides the hands of Krystyna-Wojtyna Drouet, the subject of Maria Oblicka and Alexander C. Trigg’s film Utkane. Drouet’s vibrant, handwoven tapestries do not exist in outline before their revelation on the loom. Scribbled pencil sketches on squares of paper smaller than her palm lie in a jumble on a nearby worktable, but these seem only to document the openness of her process. Each composition is a “problem” to be “resolved”. “There are only questions when I weave,” Drouet shares in singsong voiceover. “Will this shape work here and why? Can this colour be here? Should I change it?” Sometimes Drouet’s questions turn inward: “Why do I want this colour and not another?”
Utkane dwells with the liveliness of Drouet’s textiles, the provisionality of her work. On the loom, a corkscrewing fibre curls its escape from a twist of yarn, before coming under the blows of the beating comb. But the film also accords a wholeness to the aging artist’s life. Close-ups of the details and the like geometries of gewgaws and tools bring out the apple-y roundedness of Drouet’s surroundings. Visual rhymes make apparent a cycle of inspiration. A cactus dahlia is twinned with a toy windmill. The turned wooden shuttle and the spindles in the staircase are kin. Oblicka cuts from the warp threads, tensioned over the frame, to the strands of her subject’s fine hair. From there to the frayed ends of yarn overhanging her feet. These cascading correspondences beat Drouet’s world into a state of completeness. “‘What more do I need?’” asks Drouet, reading from one of her poems.
If Oblicka and Trigg’s film nets down symmetries, Laida Lertxundi’s Películas courts mess. This filmmaker won’t let her images rest, but toys with their integrity, roughens their frames. Projecting footage onto a woman’s body in the film, she introduces texture and extrinsic movement into scenes that are already playful: a pregnant belly shown to its roundest, smoothest advantage; a family making fun at a shady spot along a stream. Creases in the woman’s clothing ripple the limpid waters and the opposite bank. Those same creases rumple the pregnant belly, and, tit for tat, the hands in the image smooth them out again. Now crouching at right angles to the projection, the woman leans in to watch, so that her hair falls across the image and distresses its left-hand edge. With finger and thumb, she plays with a bright object in the water: actually, a bobbing egg. Pressing it, she makes it a button, then makes to pinch it away.
Lucas Kane’s film, Jacob’s House, is a document of a different kind of interference; though it, too, layers temporalities, provokes and reframes. As with Drouet’s studio, everything in Jacob’s house looks as though it belonged there, wanted to be there. That is, before his landlord set about wrecking the place, raining debris down on Jacob’s head, and forcing him out. Kane’s film observes an illegal repossession, but also its resistance. And in describing the reciprocity between Jacob and his home, it is as much a study of intimacy as of intimidation. When the artist, the last remaining tenant of six, runs his hands over the corridor wall where a large mural used to be, it seems as though he touches far deeper—at the colourful image beneath the fresh coat of white house paint, and even farther back. So profound is the association between Jacob and his house, it seems as if he brought it out in pictures; gave to the recesses, the risers on the staircase, the art they asked for—no more, no less. And so it isn’t hard to imagine that some years before, by some similar touch, he lifted that red-and-gold image of Jah—with its six-pointed star (one for every member of this Clinton Hill community)—clean out of the plaster; brought it forward, whole.
Thirza Wakefield is a writer, editor, and independent researcher. Her essays and film criticism have appeared in Sight & Sound, Granta, The White Review, MUBI Program Notes, and other publications.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Woven’ at Close-Up Cinema, 15 April 2026.
As clues, keys, and map legends go, the trichromatic title card passes too quickly to help the viewer decipher the film’s effects. But it’s no great matter, and no failing. On the contrary, the charisma of Schmid’s pictures hinges on our not understanding fully how they acquired their enchantments; how these coastal and arboreal scenes took on the colours of Millefiori glass. Puzzling it out is an important part of the experience of sitting with Schmid’s film. Viewers unfamiliar with colour separation techniques will seek nearer explanations for the bands of candy colour that streak fields of stiffened snow, for the tree trunks wrapped like maypoles. The mind leafs through its Rolodex of related images and fastens on printer inks, 3D centrefolds, and anaglyph lenses with cardboard frames. Making familiar sense of what is photographic logic (or photographic magic), it is likely that most viewers will be put in mind of church architecture and stained-glass windows spilling colour over stone. Contextualising the radical colouration of Schmid’s images in this way lends the film’s exterior settings the appearance of interiors, irradiated from above by light from stained-glass windows. But rather than softening masonry with pebbly mosaics of colour, this film’s borrowed iridescence softens what is already soft, blotting jewel-toned colour onto living and sinuous forms: bark, fern, surf, cloud.
Medieval-period stained-glass windows were cut and painted in accordance with—and eventually assembled upon—a scaled-up design called a vidimus, which translates from the Latin as “we have seen.” No such plan guides the hands of Krystyna-Wojtyna Drouet, the subject of Maria Oblicka and Alexander C. Trigg’s film Utkane. Drouet’s vibrant, handwoven tapestries do not exist in outline before their revelation on the loom. Scribbled pencil sketches on squares of paper smaller than her palm lie in a jumble on a nearby worktable, but these seem only to document the openness of her process. Each composition is a “problem” to be “resolved”. “There are only questions when I weave,” Drouet shares in singsong voiceover. “Will this shape work here and why? Can this colour be here? Should I change it?” Sometimes Drouet’s questions turn inward: “Why do I want this colour and not another?”
Utkane dwells with the liveliness of Drouet’s textiles, the provisionality of her work. On the loom, a corkscrewing fibre curls its escape from a twist of yarn, before coming under the blows of the beating comb. But the film also accords a wholeness to the aging artist’s life. Close-ups of the details and the like geometries of gewgaws and tools bring out the apple-y roundedness of Drouet’s surroundings. Visual rhymes make apparent a cycle of inspiration. A cactus dahlia is twinned with a toy windmill. The turned wooden shuttle and the spindles in the staircase are kin. Oblicka cuts from the warp threads, tensioned over the frame, to the strands of her subject’s fine hair. From there to the frayed ends of yarn overhanging her feet. These cascading correspondences beat Drouet’s world into a state of completeness. “‘What more do I need?’” asks Drouet, reading from one of her poems.
If Oblicka and Trigg’s film nets down symmetries, Laida Lertxundi’s Películas courts mess. This filmmaker won’t let her images rest, but toys with their integrity, roughens their frames. Projecting footage onto a woman’s body in the film, she introduces texture and extrinsic movement into scenes that are already playful: a pregnant belly shown to its roundest, smoothest advantage; a family making fun at a shady spot along a stream. Creases in the woman’s clothing ripple the limpid waters and the opposite bank. Those same creases rumple the pregnant belly, and, tit for tat, the hands in the image smooth them out again. Now crouching at right angles to the projection, the woman leans in to watch, so that her hair falls across the image and distresses its left-hand edge. With finger and thumb, she plays with a bright object in the water: actually, a bobbing egg. Pressing it, she makes it a button, then makes to pinch it away.
Lucas Kane’s film, Jacob’s House, is a document of a different kind of interference; though it, too, layers temporalities, provokes and reframes. As with Drouet’s studio, everything in Jacob’s house looks as though it belonged there, wanted to be there. That is, before his landlord set about wrecking the place, raining debris down on Jacob’s head, and forcing him out. Kane’s film observes an illegal repossession, but also its resistance. And in describing the reciprocity between Jacob and his home, it is as much a study of intimacy as of intimidation. When the artist, the last remaining tenant of six, runs his hands over the corridor wall where a large mural used to be, it seems as though he touches far deeper—at the colourful image beneath the fresh coat of white house paint, and even farther back. So profound is the association between Jacob and his house, it seems as if he brought it out in pictures; gave to the recesses, the risers on the staircase, the art they asked for—no more, no less. And so it isn’t hard to imagine that some years before, by some similar touch, he lifted that red-and-gold image of Jah—with its six-pointed star (one for every member of this Clinton Hill community)—clean out of the plaster; brought it forward, whole.
Thirza Wakefield is a writer, editor, and independent researcher. Her essays and film criticism have appeared in Sight & Sound, Granta, The White Review, MUBI Program Notes, and other publications.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Woven’ at Close-Up Cinema, 15 April 2026.