“Non-cineaste” Nicole Vögele celebrates success with doc films
Published: Thursday, Jul 25th 2024, 10:20
Updated At: Friday, Jul 26th 2024, 01:59
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Nicole Vögle makes films because she only saw a few as a child and teenager. What attracts her to documentary film is reality - its floating and changing truths.
There is this romantic notion: a child gazes wide-eyed at an even bigger screen, is forever influenced by what is on offer there and, in the best-case scenario, embarks on a successful career as a filmmaker. Swiss director Nicole Vögele laughs when she hears this story: "I'd like to say that it happened exactly like that for me, but that's not true. I stumbled into filmmaking." She recently won several awards for her new work "The Landscape and the Fury". The film has not yet been released, but will be shown in the Panorama Suisse series at the Locarno Film Festival on August 12.
But there is one moment that is a kind of beginning for them, too. It was at the Casino cinema in Aarau. Her father used to take his eldest daughter to a Sunday matinee there from time to time. "It was at the end of the 1980s," says the 40-year-old from Zurich in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. "But my memories are vague, also when it comes to the films." It was mainly animal and nature documentaries that were shown. The images from foreign worlds undoubtedly fascinated her. But to turn them into a kind of magical moment for her later career would not be correct.
Existential questions
Vögele says that she grew up with little art and culture. There was a television at home that only received Swiss channels, while her schoolmates could already watch German private channels. In addition, the TV was not on very often. Going to the movies was also the exception.
"I'm not a cinephile," says Vögele. She makes films precisely because she hasn't seen many herself. Literature, art and cinema only came into her life in her late 20s. She came to journalism and television by chance, when she was still younger than twenty. "I quickly realized that the longer formats appealed to me more than the short fodder required for news formats." So - at the age of just 24 - she applied "just like that" to SRF Dok for an ideas competition and was then allowed to make a film.
Vögele had done a KV, not a Matura. By "extreme luck", as she calls it, she ended up at a film school in Germany. "I come from making things, from practice, I don't have an intellectual backpack," she says. She enjoys the long formats, the in-depth approach. Having always been one of the youngest at SRF, she is now suddenly one of the oldest at film school.
Vögele says that her greatest strengths include her intuition for people, moods and stories, her curiosity and her impartiality. What drives her are the big, existential questions: How should we live? What is the right life? Does it even exist?
On television, there always has to be classification and immediate evaluation. With her works, the opposite is the case: "I tell my audience: I'll show you what I've filmed. Watch it and decide for yourself what it does to you."
Freedoms of the documentary film
In the documentary genre, Nicole Vögele feels both freer and more at ease. She sums it up in one sentence: "I love reality." And in every reality there are floating, changing truths. She wants to capture these. What's more, she doesn't enjoy the idea of having to write a classic screenplay. Vögele works without a fixed concept: "At the beginning, I have no idea what will happen. I just shoot - and trust that something will grow."
Back to the 80s in Aarau: there is no one movie that had a lasting impact on Nicole Vögele as a child and never let go. But there are works that impressed her. These include those by Peter Liechti and Peter Mettler. "Mettler's 'Gambling, Gods & LSD' made my brain explode," she says.
Today, Nicole Vögele makes documentary films that regularly win awards. She has an unmistakable signature style and is a professor at the Dresden University of Fine Arts. This is impressive proof: You can do it without romantic movie stories from childhood.
About the person
Nicole Vögele was born in Olten in 1983. After completing a commercial apprenticeship, she attended the MAZ School of Journalism in Lucerne. Vögele was a reporter at "Cash-TV", editor at "10 vor 10" and later at "SRF Rundschau". She studied documentary film at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy. She is known for "Frau Loosli" (2013), "Nebel" (2014) and "Closing Time" (2018). At the end of April 2024, she was awarded the Grand Prix in the international feature film competition of the Visions du Réel documentary film festival in Nyon for "The Landscape and the Fury". In addition to her work as a director, Vögele continues to work as an investigative journalist, covering topics such as cryptoleaks and pushbacks at the EU's external borders.*
*This text by Raphael Amstutz, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
©Keystone/SDA
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