Talking to… JONAS MEIER
The filmmaker on the courage to embrace ambiguity
03.03.2026
Jonas Meier’s SOCIAL LANDSCAPES will celebrate its international premiere in the Next:Wave Competition at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. The film embarks on a virtual journey around the world and is composed exclusively of online reviews.
What were the key formal decisions you made while working on SOCIAL LANDSCAPE?
From the very beginning, the music by Stefan Rusconi and Tobias Preisig (Levitation) had a major influence on making my formal decisions. At the same time, I deliberately sought a working method that would enable me to proceed intuitively and spontaneously with very simple means. Ultimately, almost all of the footage was created – literally – from my small rucksack.
Another criterion was to create a floating effect to keep in line with the music and thus allow viewers to develop their own interpretation of the multi-layered reviews in the film.
How did you go about selecting the comments, and what were your guidelines in that process?
I love contrasts – things that don’t seem to belong together at first glance and yet somehow find a ‘hidden’ consonance precisely because of that. I am also fascinated by elements that make a good match – or deliberately express the opposite of what I have discovered. It was always my intention to create as broad a field of interpretation as possible in order to shed light on the general sentiment of the review writers.
The slow, carefully constructed images contrast with the violence and cynicism of some of the comments. What kind of position should the viewer to take in relation to this tension?
That’s entirely up to each individual. I cannot and do not want to give instructions on how viewers should interpret my film. Instead, my aim is to enable an experience that is as open and individual as possible – and by no means try to impose a particular attitude among the viewers. With an intention like that, I would quickly have slipped into the role of a teacher and thus undermined the desired mood and atmosphere of the film. I am well aware that many viewers are looking for clearer answers. But they will have to find them elsewhere.
The film questions a form of voracious tourism that is often indifferent to the people and ‘imperfections’ of the places visited. Is this an observation, a critique, or also a personal fear?
I would like to leave the answer to this question up to the audience.