RIFF is all about recognizing and promoting young filmmakers, therefore we are excited to announce that this year Ramon and Silvan Zürcher will be highlighted as Emerging Masters. The Swiss filmmaking brothers are celebrated for their precise, poetic approach to human relationships and everyday life.
The Strange Little Cat (2013), premiered at Berlinale and played at over 80 festivals, while the follow-up, The Girl and the Spider (2021), won Best Director in Berlinale’s Encounters section. In 2024, they completed the acclaimed “animal trilogy” with The Sparrow in the Chimney.
We had the privilege of speaking to both brothers about their filmmaking process and inspirations during this Interview. To hear more from the Zürcher Brothers and watch their movies – the “animal trilogy” – join us at RIFF, where all three movies will be shown with Ramon and Silvan Zürcher present for Q&As.
RIFF: Welcome to RIFF. Have you visited Iceland before and do you have any plans on what you want to see while you are here?
RAMON: No, never. But it always was a destination with a lot of fascination and so we’re looking forward to visiting Reykjavik.
SILVAN: Well, actually, our stay will be just very brief. But I would be very fascinated in exploring the surrounding of Reykjavik, actually also the whole island. So it’s definitely a destination to one day come for a longer period with a friend and maybe also rent a car to really have the opportunity to explore the island and the geology.
RIFF: Speaking of your interests, what interests drew you both to filmmaking? And how have they presented themselves in this trilogy?
RAMON: There are different things that are central interests, but maybe one big interest I have is psychology and human behaviours. And so I’m often very fascinated by films that create an audiovisual realm or audiovisual universe that presents a kind of psyche or a psychological character study. For example, the films by Ingmar Bergman, or other films that use audiovisual audiovisual language to build an interior or a psychological space. So I would highlight this as one central interest of my work.
SILVAN: Also, I’m interested in the interrelations between theater, literature, and cinema. For example, to use dialogues, the spoken word, the written word, in a way that is very close to literature but interrogating what happens when you use it in a filmic or cinematographic space—or also the theater space, to not be afraid of having a proximity to the theatre space, to go there and see what emerges when you use it within a film your film language. Also, like Ramon, I’m very much interested in characters and their personalities and psychology—in a way that is maybe not so literal but a bit more poetic or like using dialogues, not in a way that explains the characters but that still makes sense, where it opens the character up to ambiguity or ambivalence in the way you use dialogue like monologues also.
RIFF: I think these interests are very present throughout your films. The “animal trilogy”, as I understand, was not originally a trilogy, but it sort of came together as one. Are you able to talk about how that happened?
RAMON: Yes – in 2010-11, I wrote The Strange Little Cat. Then, we shot it in 2011-12 with the post-production, and then we presented it in 2013 in Berlinale’s Forum section. After the presentation and the festival circuit of that film, Silvan started to write a script with the working title ‘The Floor Plan of my New Flat’. I then started to write The Sparrow in the Chimney, which is now the third installment of the animal trilogy. During the process of the writing of those two scripts, we saw some proximities, both formal and concerning the topics. And so, during the process, we started to see those three films as siblings, as kind of a small family. Silvan had the spider, which was an important part of the film, and I had all those flying animals – of course, the sparrow, but also other animals like fireflies and butterflies. And so we started to really build the trilogy and to start thinking of it as a trilogy and to look at the similarities but also how the three films could develop, so that it's not three times the same film – that they are kind of close to each other but also different.
RIFF: Yes, each film builds on the next one, and also develops in terms of scope and ambition as well – were you aware of these films building on one another? Was this a conscious decision to look at the previous script and develop it further?
SILVAN: Actually, for us, The Strange Little Cat was already a kind of playground for us, we also had these playful elements: about eight characters, a dog, a moth, other animals, and then objects in the kitchen, where they all played a central role, a part. And so we had this limited confined space of the kitchen, and later the whole apartment, but in the center it’s actually the kitchen space and these elements I mentioned. And then, when making the next films, we also wanted to broaden our scope or the spectra of things we’re playing with. So in The Girl and the Spider, we didn’t want to focus on eight hours of one day but instead two days, and we didn’t want to have just one apartment but two houses with apartments in it, and then kind of construe a mosaic or network of characters, Then, in The Sparrow in the Chimney, we’re now in a big house with a family and also the neighborhood, with a lake and a wooden cabin, a bit like a village, so for us the idea indeed was, from film to film and within the the idea of the trilogy, to broaden the spectra and to have more filmic elements to play with.
RAMON: And we also thought for those three films a little bit about how to construct music. So The Strange Little Cat was rather like chamber music, The Girl and the Spider rather like a melancholic ballad, and The Sparrow in the Chimney was a big opera, where it’s also more explosive and with more emotions and more contrast.
RIFF: It’s very interesting to see that progression – almost a meaner streak – that you introduce in each film as these humans interact with the animals. Are you able to expand a little bit on how you see the roles of animals in your films and their interactions with humans?
RAMON: Yes, I guess that, as you described already, in The Girl and the Spider, there’s the scene where the girl kills the fly, but it was embedded in the relationship between the young boy and the protagonist, the young girl, who stays back in the flat share. And I think that also, in The Sparrow in the Chimney, the animals are kind of woven into the net of interactions in that family web. In the film, there are two spaces. There’s the family house and there’s the wooden cabin. These two spaces are very important for the whole story. And in the wooden cabin, it’s rather the realm of the dogs, and in the family house, there’s also a dog but it’s rather the realm of the domesticated cat. And so, what we like is not really to only use the animals as symbols but also to have them as very concrete elements that are woven into the interactions and stories.
SILVAN: To add to this, there’s also a structure of power, with adults maybe being more powerful than the children and with a certain violence, like in all the films in the trilogy, and there’s the idea to then also integrate the animals into these power structures. For example, in The Sparrow in the Chimney, the cat becomes a victim and Leon a perpetrator, but, in Leon’s relation with his mother, we observe the mother as maybe having potential as a perpetrator and Leon being the victim of certain tensions and atmospheres. But also, they’re a poetic way to open the narration because, often in classical storytelling, the animals in a household are not centered at all but very much outside of the story.
RAMON: As I said, the film is mostly a psychological film, and in the center, of course, are the human beings, the family, the relationships. But human beings are also like human animals, and we highlight that in our trilogy.. So humans are also part of the animals’ ecosystem. For example, Liv, the biologist in The Sparrow in the Chimney, often speaks about fireflies or dogs, and when she speaks of those animals, sometimes it is a little bit as if she would speak of herself.
RIFF: Moving on to how you portray films, I'd say that you have a very singular style of filmmaking, especially in terms of off-screen space. But do you have any directors or filmmakers that have influenced your style of filmmaking?
RAMON: It's difficult, of course. There are directors who were very important with regard to the camera work but also the sound design—the films by Robert Bresson, for example, and how he uses sound and moving images, where the audiovisual means are at the center of his films. So, for me, he’s a huge genius of moving images and sound. But there are also other very modern filmmakers, like Antonioni and Bergman, or, for example, Eric Rohmer. I love the characters that he builds because, whenever I watch one of his films, it always feels as if I have really met those characters. And for example, Lucrecia Martel, were in her universe, as well as in The Girl and the Spider, the filming of the space is more fragmented, so you don't get the whole picture from the very beginning but the audience or viewer has to piece the film together as it evolves. And this also is something that fascinates us: to have an active viewer, where not everything is established from the very beginning, and to then have a very convenient position as a viewer but to be forced to engage with the film in order to find the whole picture.
RIFF: I’m very interested in talking to you about how you two work together. How the filmmaking process itself developed your relationship as brothers. Do you feel like you’ve grown stronger together through this filmmaking process?
SILVAN: It’s difficult to compare how our lives would have been if we had different and separate jobs, like me being a teacher and Ramon a filmmaker. Actually, now we’re both personally and professionally connected. I think, of course, that we have discovered a lot in one another by working together because, work-wise. Filmmaking is quite complex and intense as there are so many institutions and elements involved. There’s good moments and bad moments, so the relationship is also very intense, especially when you’re at the core of this together. So I think we discovered parts of our personalities because of this intensity. Also, our relationship isn’t static. It’s very dynamic. But yes. We have to talk about a lot. We’re also trying to have separated realms where he has his ‘me’ space and I have my ‘me’ space so that there’s not always a ‘we’ space. That’s something that is also very important for our psychological health.
RIFF: Are you able to talk about what your new projects are?
SILVAN: Yes, now I’m writing a script whose title literally translates to English as ‘The Skin of my Desire’. It’s about a psychosexual relationship between two people. It’s interested in certain abysses but also opening towards more of a psycho thriller, but it’s also a horror, which is a genre I’m trying to flirt with, but still staying kind of personal or individual. And Ramon has another project he’s developing on his own.
RAMON: Yes, it’s very much at the beginning. It’s a kind of coming of age love story but with different layers of reality. And then after, when we write the first draft of these scripts, we will share them with each other and collaborate and work together.
RIFF: Finally as you might know, in the past few years, RIFF has hosted screenings in some unusual places, like ice caves, volcano caves, and thermal pools. I was interested if you’ve watched any films in unusual places?
RAMON: We have two situations, two images that pop up. The first was during a midnight screening in a swimming pool. We were teenagers and the films screened were themed around their setting being the sea. During the whole night, we watched three films, and it was kind of torture because we were so tired. We were on this plastic boat and watching these films and it was so…
SILVAN: Wet. Freezing.
RAMON: It was so freezing! And it was torture.
SILVAN: We were so tired, and even though the water was warm it started to feel so cold. The second situation was with The Strange Little Cat. Ramon went to Dharamsala, in the Himalayas, where there’s a film festival. There was this theatrical space where monkeys were very much integrated into the action, so they just walked by the stage during the film, they were on the screen, next to the screen, in the audience.
RAMON: Yes. It was very special because reality and the reality of the film kind of melted together. It was a very special dream but also a bit of a nightmarish atmosphere – I was always afraid that these monkeys would come and do something weird.
RIFF: Those are all the questions I have! It’s been lovely to hear you speak about your films – I love every single one of them and it’s an honor to talk to you about them.
*This Interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.
RIFF 2025 takes place in Reykjavík from September 25th to October 5th, join us for 11 days of awarded films, great special events and don’t miss the chance to meet Ramon & Silvan.