
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
Maren Eggert, Britta Hammelstein, Luise Heyer, Andreas Döhler, Milan Zerzawy, Lea Zoe Voss
Switzerland
2024
In German with English subtitles
At The Cinematheque and International Village
At Fifth Avenue
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits & Director
Producer
Silvan Zürcher
Screenwriter
Ramon Zürcher
Cinematography
Alex Hasskerl
Editor
Ramon Zürcher
Production Design
Peter Scherz
Original Music
Balz Bachmann

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
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Chez Jolie Coiffure
Having immigrated to Belgium from Cameroon, Sabine manages Chez Jolie Coiffure. Her salon patrons, many of them undocumented immigrants, are not only be made to feel beautiful but can also escape the daily difficulties and harsh realities of their lives.
No Other Land
Deemed by many critics one of the essential films of 2024, a multiple festival award winner and a nominee for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, No Other Land is a reminder that mass expulsion is by no means a new reality for Palestinians.
Atlantics
In Dakar, Ada loves Souleiman but has been promised to another man. One night, Souleiman and his co-workers leave the country by sea. Several days later, a fire ruins Ada's wedding and a mysterious fever starts to spread. It seems Souleiman has returned.