A young woman and her double are murdered on the banks of the Danube, at two moments in history experienced simultaneously. Time cracks. The image breathes, contracts, splits in two – it becomes territory, memory, an earthquake. A world disappears and is reborn in a single pulse.

This opening gesture launches ADA KALEH: a cinematic and musical experience where the image seems to struggle against its own extinction, where the spectres of the past mingle with the present in an attempt not to sink into oblivion. Between baroque fiction, hallucinatory documentary and a rite of resurrection, two films respond to one another – screened one after the other – as if the gaze must fracture to perceive what can no longer be seen.

Two films do not follow one another. They overlap, turn one into the other, held in a knot that cannot be untangled. Two moments coexist within the same image, compressed, undecidable, as if each shot carried within it its own prior existence and its own return. Two deaths accomplish nothing: they dig, they open up, they give rise to two resurrections – not as reparation, but as survival, as that which persists because nothing has been abolished.

One island disappears. Another is promised. One is swallowed up, the other uninhabitable. Between the two, there is no substitution: the void persists. The river does not carry History. It holds it back, it saturates it, it deposits it. What was meant to disappear does not disappear. It shifts, it returns, it takes shape elsewhere.

The female body goes through  this fracture as a place of condensation. It does not embody: it carries. One death settles here, another returns there. An image forms here, another cracks there. The territory becomes a spectre. The spectre becomes flesh. Nothing stabilises. Everything is doubled. What is at play here does not belong to narrative. It is a point of torsion – an origin in the sense that it does not begin, but ties together, in a single movement, becoming and disappearance. What has been destroyed does not reconstitute itself. It persists. It insists. It watches.

The film does not merely show. It operates. It delves deep into that very fissure where the image ceases to be a surface and becomes an unstable substance, permeated by its own layers, by its own ghosts.
Two films, then — not to say it twice, but to keep this impossibility open. One holds back. The other overflows. Between the two, nothing is resolved. The gaze does not stabilise: it, too, fractures.

What was meant to be erased returns.
What was meant to disappear persists.
What was meant to fall silent continues.

NICOLAS NADAR

Composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, live performer

A musician active on the Swiss music scene for some twenty years, Nicolas Nadar made a name for himself in 2006 under the nickname Fauve. Acclaimed by the press and spotted by the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, the Lausanne-based artist’s debut album earned him invitations to perform at numerous clubs and festivals in Switzerland and France, as well as at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2007, alongside Raphelson, Sophie Hunger, John Parish and the Lausanne Sinfonietta.

His work oscillates between sensitive electronica, organic ambient and cinematic structures, blending electronic textures, fragile vocals and soundscapes. In 2012, Clocks’n’Clouds was released, a darker, more electronic album that also received very positive reviews, both in Switzerland and abroad. In 2015, forced to change his name due to constant confusion with the French band Fauve#, he became Nicolas Nadar and composed the original soundtrack for the series Anomalia (dir. Pierre Monnard), broadcast on RTS 1 and France 5.

Since 2016, Nicolas Nadar has composed music for various documentary films (for Pierre Monnard, Lila Ribi, Bruno Deville and Daniel Wyss), shows and podcasts, and has continued his long-standing collaboration with the artist Radu ZERO.

Discography: as Nicolas Nadar:

– Sleeper Hits: Tropical Abstractions (Poor Records, 2021)
– Delamuraz OST (Snowcat Records 2018)
– Le Business du Sang OST (Snowcat Records 2017)
– Anomalia OST (Snowcat Records, 2016)

As Fauve:

– Covers & Leftovers 2003–2014 (SongeSong recs, 2020)
– Be Kind, Don’t Rewind EP (Two Gentlemen, 2013)
– Clocks’n’Clouds (Two Gentlemen, 2012)
– An Evening At The Montreux Jazz Festival (Gentlemen, 2007)
– Fauve (Gentlemen, 2006)

NATACHA ATLAS

Guest singer

As the lead vocalist on “Memory of Jade”, the film’s final segment, Natacha Atlas is quite simply a legend. From the pioneering electro-world music of Transglobal Underground in the 1990s to her recent jazz-infused albums, the Belgian singer
of Egyptian origin has established a unique and sublime vocal style on the world stage. Drawing on her Eastern roots for the many nuances of a delicate lyricism, the singer displays her artistry across a wide range of musical contexts, whilst maintaining a remarkable discretion over the years.
Approached in 2020 by Radu ZERO, Natacha Atlas chose the filmmaker to bring two tracks from her latest album (“Black Is The Color” and “Inherent Rhythm”). Following this fruitful collaboration, the artist agreed to take part in the creation of “Memory of Jade”, the centrepiece of the ADA KALEH project, whose slow crescendo she enhances with her crystalline vocals.