Part of this year’s Visions du Réel Film Market official selection, this short film—set in the wetlands of Fornebu, just outside Oslo—blends documentary and experimental cinema to explore the mysterious and deeply felt connection between ornithologists and the birds they study. Filmmaker Maël Mubalegh follows his sister Naïd, herself an ornithologist, as she searches for the elusive marsh warbler—a small migratory songbird whose unusually complex and unpredictable song continues to baffle scientists.

Built around an evocative soundscape created by Mubalegh, composer-researcher Tore Witsø Rafoss, and bioacoustician Joachim Poutaraud, the film gently probes the boundary between the human and the non-human—inviting us to get closer to the world as birds might experience it.

Director Biography – Maël Mubalegh

Maël Mubalegh (b. 1997, Blois, France) is a filmmaker and film student in the joint ECAL/HEAD Master’s program between Lausanne and Geneva. He studied literature, philosophy, and cinema at the Sorbonne, then earned a Master’s in Arts and Languages at EHESS Paris. As a 2018–2019 DAAD scholar, he studied art history and philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he began developing a cinematic approach blending documentary, experimental film, and fiction—working notably with filmmaker Katrin Eissing.