A decade after “Aloys” won the Fipresci Prize at the Berlin Festival’s Panorama, Swiss filmmaker Tobias Nölle returns to the section with “Tristan Forever,” a meditative, genre-elusive hybrid that tracks a French doctor’s 30-year obsession with Tristan da Cunha, the world’s most isolated inhabited island, and his bid to settle there permanently.
Produced by Hugofilm Features, SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen and Arte G.E.I.E., the film is co-directed and co-written by its own subject, Loran Bonnardot, the doctor in question. “Tristan Forever” is a shift for Nölle, who has built a body of fiction work defined by meticulous planning. Here, he surrendered control to instinct and to the rhythms of a volcanic rock in the South Atlantic reachable by only six to eight boats a year.
“It felt like giving up the usual means of control to purely rely on instincts,” Nölle told Variety. “First it was intimidating. I was afraid I would return without a film, and Tristan da Cunha is the last place you can go back for a reshoot.” Already on the boat, he said, “the 10 days in stormy waters swept away most of those fears. It truly felt like a journey to a mysterious place, and that’s the best feeling you can have as a director.”
Originally slated to shoot in 2019, the production was set back for years when the pandemic sealed Tristan da Cunha off from the outside world, an irony not lost on a film whose themes circle isolation as both affliction and aspiration. The film follows Bonnardot, now in his 50s, as he boards the ship once more, this time to stay if the island’s council approve his admission. His fisherman friend, Martin, has his own perspective. And Bonnardot himself is shadowed by a lifelong, perhaps unresolvable, search for isolation.
Nölle, who also served as cinematographer and co-editor, said the extreme limitations of filming in such a remote location became the film’s aesthetic DNA. “It’s so slow, it’s so quiet — on some days, to film a grazing cow or a wave crashing against the shore was the highlight,” he said. “.Your focus shifts, from dramatic action to the spectacle of the minimal: a penguin hopping around, the fog creeping across the cliffs or a mysterious glance of an islander. It puts you in a dreamlike state of searching and finding, like a fisherman coming home with a bucket full of images.”
The decision to blur the boundaries between documentary, fiction and memory was taken early. “When I met Loran and he told me that sometimes he’s not sure if Tristan really exists or if it’s just in his head, we had found common ground on the tonality,” Nölle said. He likened the film’s register to “that brief moment of uncertainty when you wake up and you’re not quite sure if you are still in a dream or awake in the present day.”
Bonnardot, who has been visiting the island for 30 years and calls its community at least once a week, said the pull toward Tristan da Cunha was never about escape. “At no point did I feel like I was running away from anything,” he told Variety. “It was always about going further, discovering more, and sharing a different way of life.”
His integration into the island’s fabric ran deep. Invited into the home of islanders Martin and Iris, he became godfather to their daughter Rachel. “At that point, I was truly part of the family. That was when the idea of settling down there became a real possibility.”
What the film ultimately resolved for Bonnardot, he said, came through the words of an islander named Glenda: “That it is possible to belong to more than one place. And in saying that, she resolved a tension within me.”
Nölle acknowledged that co-directing with his own subject required careful negotiation. “My credo is to never look down on my characters, and that became a mutual agreement,” he said. Bonnardot, he noted, is “extremely fit — he always wants to run, climb and balance on top of every rooftop,” which sometimes yielded thrilling footage and sometimes veered toward the performative. “He’s also fearless. Sometimes you simply have to stop him, so he doesn’t bring himself into danger. He has escaped death a few times on Tristan, and it was my biggest fear during shooting.”
Producer Christof Neracher of Hugofilm Features, who has now worked with Nölle on three films, said the hybrid nature of the project extended to its financing. “Our first instinct was to submit to the documentary sections of the funding bodies and broadcasters, since we felt they are more open for hybrid projects,” he said. “However, this strategy only partly worked out, maybe also because Tobias Nölle is known for his feature films.”
In the end, the film drew equally from documentary and fiction funds. “Even Swiss Television participated both with fiction and documentary funding,” Neracher said. “I am very happy about that, because it really reflects what the film is.”
Neracher expressed confidence that the film can travel beyond the festival circuit. “It tells the story of an almost utopian place, which, I hope, will make viewers long to ‘escape’ to for 90 minutes,” he said. He also pointed to a broader market shift: “There are audiences which increasingly seek more sensory experiences as an alternative to mainstream storytelling, and maybe also want to learn and reflect something rather than only be entertained.”