ALOYS

Private investigator Aloys Adorn is quietly devastated by the loss of his father. He copes with his grief and loneliness by capturing (and then compulsively viewing) surveillance tape footage of the world around him. When his tapes and camera are stolen after a drunken night out, however, Adorn’s austere, solitary existence unexpectedly changes. He’s contacted by an unknown woman, who says he can try “telephone walking”—or emotional connection via intense, imagination-filled calls—to get his beloved property back. With these calls, Adorn is drawn into an increasingly vivid, social world where he’s the life of the party. This soon brings new complications, not the least of which is his neighbor Vera, who’s in the hospital after a suicide attempt. ALOYS takes liberties with time and setting to create disorienting, delightful ambiguity. Is Adorn’s happiness a figment of his imagination? And, if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? ALOYS blurs the lines between fantasy and reality and is a thought-provoking treatise on the agony and ecstasy of human vulnerability. (In Swiss German with subtitles) —A.Z.