Im Dickicht

“Like in a dream, shadowy landscapes pass by. Time and again, the silhouette of a decaying, overgrown ammunition hall breaks through the image. The gaze drifts toward the sky, searching for stability, only to lose itself once more in the dense forest. Katharina Pichler’s experimental film Im Dickicht unfolds a subtle, almost eerie tension through its alienated visual language and uses the forest as a metaphor for the complexity of human perception.” (Vienna Shorts 2025/Louise Linsenbolz)

Jury Statement Vienna Shorts (2025):
“A visual meditation on the physical properties of the film camera: depth of field, unstable refractions, motion blur, chromatic distortions, bloom, and dispersion. By dissecting a forest and its historical traces, the film creates a dreamlike state where past and present merge through ghostly imagery of abandoned structures reclaimed by nature. It cultivates an outstanding atmosphere of quiet unease — reflecting the disorienting complexity of memory, perception, and the cinematic apparatus.”

Jury Statement Linz International Short Film Festival (2025):
“The sound design takes center stage in this intriguing experimental film. Wafting, rattling structures morph into images of landscapes and strangely intimate, but warped, views of places in nature that alternate between a luring beauty and a nightmarish feeling. These images move with an immersive composition of rattling, roaring, swirling sounds and subtle, but ominous, melodies that give this work a dramatic arc, and a wavering feeling of suspense.”

VIDEOFORMES International Hybrid & Digital Arts 2026
“The professional and student juries decided to award a special jury prize to Katharina Pichler’s work titled “Im Dickicht” (In the thicket). Forest videos often share many common elements: the omnipresent verticality, the play of light, and stillness are essential components. Yet Katharina Pichler has managed to convey other aspects to us through this work. Textures, blurs, and colors intertwine; shots overlap, and images scroll by as if we were turning the pages of a book. The image processing draws us into a world where memory takes center stage. The silhouette of a former ammunition depot evokes events that transport us to a world filled with ambivalent feelings—a mix of nostalgia, memory, and strange dreams. Spectral images haunt us throughout the video; they draw us into a phantasmagorical yet very real universe. One of the few entries in this 2026 selection where narrative gives way to suggestion. Each shot serves the next in a fluid, organic movement, leading us from forests to thickets where we hide and take refuge, to observe or to survive.”