Tea Time with Still Working

Interview with Julietta Korbel, director of Still Working

What inspired you tell Pavel’s story?
I guess the name Pavel is somehow symbolic. It is the name of my painter grandfather, whom I was very close to and who brought me up. He was a Hungarian-Slovak immigrant, who came to Switzerland in 1968. When he passed away, I inherited his painting studio in Montreux, from which I could see the factory Chavalon from afar (the shooting location). Between my grandfather’s paintings, I saw this factory as an abandoned island in the middle of the mountains. This was the starting point of the film. To me, Pavel was a poetic introvert, his intimate world was expressed in his works of art.

Tell us more about the power plant. Where is it located? How did you get to shoot there?
I chose the abandoned factory of Chavalon as a scenery, in the Valais, southern Switzerland. The place has an authentic and almost unrealistic nature that evokes the past whereas it incarnated a utopian vision of the future. Chavalon was built in 1964 and closed in 1999, built in altitude with seventeen retro villas that were used to house the factory’s employees. The location was recently privatized and it is completely closed to the public, so it was honestly very difficult to get access and permission to shoot. It is a unique space in Switzerland, it seems as if time stands still there. In my research, I met the actual guard, as well as former engineers. They gave me plans and information about machine systems. I feel as if the Chavalon plant represents an important testimony to the economic history of Switzerland, from recent energetic transitions to the technological developments of the last decades.

What would you like the audience to take from it?
It seems to me that we try to define the present only once we are afraid of losing it. Pavel, the guard, lives in a repressed attachment to his factory, until the day when Gabriel, the young engineer, comes to put the place out of order. Through the portrayal of a character who refuses the evolution of the world, I wanted to tell an intimate reflexion on what gives meaning to our existences.

Tell us more about your style as a filmmaker. What sort of genres and themes would you like to work on?
I feel as if I still have to evolve and manifest my tendencies. It is my first short film on such a scale.

Are there any works of art or films that have inspired you?
There is a range of films and art pieces that have influenced me, but nothing in particular. I love films that give me a feeling of space, to think and imagine, to feel. Also films that play with the medium of time.

Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
I love the short form. It is the form of essay, the form of intense and concentrated ideas. It allows to go into plenty of different universes in a very short amount of time. It allows for experimentation, for radical actions and reactions. I also think that the idea of a time-restricted or time-defined form of film will change, as more and more information becomes condensed, fast consumed. I hope that cinema will free itself from this time-defined set up into something more flexible and individual. Either way, hopefully we will be able to take time for silence in film, for those efficient moments of breaths in a scene.

Still Working is part of International Competition I4.