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The Sparrow in the Chimney film image; serious woman looking ahead with several people in the background

The Sparrow in the Chimney

Der Spatz im Kamin

Panorama

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North American Premiere

In a remote but spacious ancestral home, where Karen (Maren Eggert) lives with her husband and children, preparations are afoot for an extravagant birthday celebration. As the house starts to fill up, however, tensions mount, and the space becomes a veritable pressure cooker of longstanding familial strife. As animals of all sorts roam freely through the airy domestic space, the location becomes the locus of sundry overlapping dramas. It is only a matter of time before the fires start burning.

The third and final installment of Ramon Zürcher’s “animal trilogy,” following 2013’s The Strange Little Cat and 2021’s The Girl and the Spider (both co-directed with Silvan Zürcher), The Sparrow in the Chimney finds the filmmaker perfecting his signature aesthetic. Character interactions are at once psychologically grounded and quirkily exaggerated; edits are deployed for maximum spatial disruption; surreal comic interludes bleed into quotidian reality. An entropic symphony of domestic existence, it is a film whose luminous surfaces yield only deeper enigmas.

 

Supported by

Director
Cast

Maren Eggert, Britta Hammelstein, Luise Heyer, Andreas Döhler, Milan Zerzawy, Lea Zoe Voss

Credits
Country of Origin

Switzerland

Year

2024

Language

In German with English subtitles

Film Contact
18+

At The Cinematheque and International Village

19+

At Fifth Avenue

117 min
Drama Family Relations
Zürcher Film

Book Tickets

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Credits & Director

Producer

Silvan Zürcher

Screenwriter

Ramon Zürcher

Cinematography

Alex Hasskerl

Editor

Ramon Zürcher

Production Design

Peter Scherz

Original Music

Balz Bachmann

Ramon Zürcher headshot; The Sparrow in the Chimney director

Ramon Zürcher

Born in 1982, Swiss screenwriter and director Ramon Zürcher studied visual arts at the Bern Academy of the Arts and film directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin. His debut feature, The Strange Little Cat premiered at Berlinale Forum in 2013 and was selected at over 80 festivals. In 2021, his second film, The Girl and the Spider, also premiered at Berlinale where it was awarded Best Director and the FIPRESCI prize in the Encounters section. The Sparrow in the Chimney is his third feature.

Filmography: The Strange Little Cat (2013); The Girl and the Spider (2021)

Photo by Iris Janke

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