Faire des Vagues (Making Waves)
2023 · 17m · Switzerland
Directed by Hannah Klaas
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Corinne, a mother living with HIV, finds strength in Lake Geneva’s icy waters through swimming, filming, and acrobatics with her daughter.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a HIV diagnosis narrative to be heavy-handed catharsis, so Klaas just… films a mother and daughter doing acrobatics in a lake and somehow that's the most radical thing here—she trusts the water and the body to do the talking.
There's a considered compositional restraint at work: the documentary form stays devotional to the swimmers themselves rather than performing explanatory work, placing it in a lineage of intimate family portraiture that understands absence of sentimentality as its own kind of rigor.
The decision to frame this through the mother's own camera—to let her film herself and her daughter moving through the water rather than asking us to watch from outside—transforms a potential wellness narrative into something about reclaiming the gaze itself.