Berlin-based visual artist Ann Oren transitioned from more than a decade immersed in short-form, docu and experimental cinema into her audacious feature debut, Piaffe — a bold, body-conscious fever dream that signaled the arrival of a striking new voice. As noted in our Nicholas Bell’s ★★★★ review, the film is nothing short of arresting, a work that fuses tactile sensuality with conceptual rigor. Its selection for competition for the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2022 further cemented Oren’s emergence from the gallery space into from promising debut into a sophomore feature that may contain overlapping themes of desire and control, here is everything we know so far … for Ann Oren’s Objet A.
Packaging for the film took place back in 2023 with participation at the Locarno’s Alliance 4 Development lab and FIDMarseille’s FIDLab back in 2023, and production took place in Germany and Luxembourg last June of 2025 for about a month-long shoot.
Ingeborg and Adam are partners in life and at work. They are visionary hand surgeons who love being in control. She loves stealing objects, whereas he wants nothing more than to be her object. After an accident, she is forced to slow down and accept the help of a young, enigmatic woman named Gaia. As Ingeborg develops new obsessions, Adam begins searching for his own object of desire.
Simone Bucio makes it two for two with Oren, and we also find the likes of Louis Hofmann, Aenne Schwarz, and Georg Friedrich.
We have Juan Sarmiento G. – the cinematographer to Simón Mesa Soto and Kaouther Ben Hania cinema. On the producing side we find Schuldenberg Films’ Sophie Ahrens, Fabian Altenried and Kristof Gerega, Tarantula’s Donato Rotunno and asterisk’s Vicky Miha.
Seeing that production was completed last summer and that this German-language film was not a Berlinale competition selection means the team might have waited for the Croisette. Locarno is definitely in the cards if for some reason this does not break the Critic’s Week, Directors’ Fortnight or Un Certain Regard sections in Cannes.
