Shooting Crows (2018, Switzerland) by Christine Hürzeler

Christine Hürzeler’s Shooting Crows Joins the Auteur Cinema Archive

The Auteur Cinema Archive is delighted to announce the inclusion of Shooting Crows (2018, Switzerland) by Christine Hürzeler—a visually haunting and quietly hypnotic short documentary that turns a fog-shrouded park into a liminal world where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur with each passing image.

At first glance, Shooting Crows is an observational piece: a park, a drifting fog, the distant calls of crows, and a homeless man sleeping beneath the trees. But as Hürzeler's carefully composed shots unfold, something shifts. A crow is shot. A woman disappears. Police gather evidence. And yet, nothing is explained. Instead, the film builds a mood of subtle unease and surreal detachment, held together by the lyrical thread of a narrator whose voice guides us through impressions rather than answers.

This is storytelling as suggestion, where atmosphere becomes plot and implication becomes tension. Hürzeler—trained in anthropology and sociology—uses her camera like a researcher of human ambiguity, capturing stray gestures, obscure moments, and that eerily beautiful circling of birds in the sky after every gunshot. The crows, timeless symbols of death and myth, become both witnesses and omens in a setting that feels increasingly like the threshold of another world.

Curator Kris De Meester on the film’s inclusion:
"Shooting Crows is a masterclass in suggestion. Christine Hürzeler creates an obscure, fascinating world without ever showing her hand. Through poetic narration and precisely framed imagery, she reveals how fragile our grip on reality can be. It’s this ability to conjure a deeply cinematic space from seemingly ordinary surroundings that defines auteur cinema—and why her film belongs in the Archive."

Premiering at Visions du Réel in 2018 and later screening at DOK Leipzig and the Ghent Viewpoint Documentary Film Festival—where it won the Best Photography Award—Shooting Crows has been quietly gathering recognition for its haunting visual language and its philosophical depth.

In Hürzeler’s own words, the film is a kind of “science fiction, cut from the everyday”—and it’s precisely that approach, rooted in observation yet drifting into the dreamlike, that places Shooting Crows among the most vital entries in the Auteur Cinema Archive. It’s a film that lingers like a memory you can’t quite place, where each image opens a crack in reality wide enough to let the imagination pour through.