Das Resort began as an accident of circumstance. During the first Covid-19 lockdown, Kessler found himself able to see his hometown — an Austrian alpine ski resort normally overrun with tourism — completely empty for the first time in his life: “a wonderful yet eerie sight that had a deep impact on me.” He turned the experience into a 22-minute short film that follows an unnamed narrator across three points in his life — childhood, adulthood, old age — as he moves nonlinearly through memories of a long-lost father and a virus-ridden, dystopian version of his own mountain village, eventually arriving back at a cabin from childhood where, at last, “I’m dreaming again.”
Shot by cinematographer Clemens Paul across the empty pistes, abandoned cabins, stalled cable cars, and vacant streets of Lech and Mittelberg, the film deliberately misreads its own emptiness: this is not nature returning to a pristine state once people withdraw, but a landscape whose human engraving is now inescapable even at its quietest. Kessler frames this directly as a rebuttal to pandemic-era nature-rebound narratives — “it is evident that human activity has already engraved itself to a point where it can be found even in the most remote and deserted regions” — and extends the argument into a broader question about technological society: whether the same relentless focus on progress that built the resort infrastructure now stops people from recognizing the actual state of their own well-being, or that of the nonhuman life around them.
Das Resort screened at the Seattle Film Festival, Berlin Shorts Awards (Semi-Finalist), Phoenix Shorts (Winner), The IndieFEST Film Awards, Independent Shorts Awards LA (Winner), NewFilmmakers NY, and the Amsterdam Lift-Off Film Festival between September 2022 and October 2023. The film was supported by a Kultur Vorarlberg grant, and a related series of large-format panoramic photographs — aerial and ground views of the same emptied landscape, overprinted with fragments of the film’s German-language narration — has been shown framed as a standalone exhibition work.
Film — installation views
Photographs
