KALTBLUT. presents POET TOWER FIGURINE! A film directed by Emily Macrander. Are you in control of your own story? Or is it someone bigger, unseen, unknowable that guides your creative impulses? This is the question at the centre of POET TOWER FIGURINE, a surreal short film made in collaboration with Danish artist Josephine ‘Child’ Carl of CHILD + THE BANNED. It was inspired by a dream she had as a child: that she was a tiny porcelain figurine in a world without logic or direction, moved only by the hand of a much larger girl. And if that hand ever stopped playing, she’d simply stop existing.
That image didn’t just inspire the film; it guided it. A quiet, unsettling metaphor for what it means to create without fully knowing who or what is steering. As a woman and an artist, influence from the outside is always there, for better or worse. It became the emotional undercurrent of the piece, shaping its tone and movement like a memory you can’t quite place but still carry.
Shot on Super8 at Museum Insel Hombroich – an uncanny art and architecture space outside Cologne, Germany – the film follows a figure caught somewhere between autonomy and surrender. Josephine moves through the landscape in costumes by two young female designers, shifting between being the author and being authored, watched and watching back, in control and under the spell of something undefined.
POET TOWER FIGURINE is about the strange, intuitive spaces where creative expression begins. Sometimes the work shapes us as much as we shape it. The film is a meditation on that shift. The moment when authorship feels blurred, unstable, or even irrelevant. It embraces softness and surrealism, memory and impulse.
Directed by Emily Macrander / www.emilymacrander.com / Instagram: @emily_macrander
Starring Josie Child of CHILD + THE BANNED / www.childandthebanned.com / Instagram: @child.utopia
Music produced by Isabel Gracefield and CHILD + THE BANNED / Instagram: @isabelgracefield & @child.utopia
Sound Design by Josie Child / Instagram: @child.utopia
Sound Mix by Callum Donaldson / Instagram: @callumdonaldson_audio
Styling by Meja Taserud / Instagram: @mejataserud
Colour Grading by Vanessa Aparicio at Glassworks / Instagram: @vanessa_colour @glassworksvfx
Graphics by Penina Zeltser / Instagram: @penina_zeltser_
Featuring Architecture by Erwin Heerich & Raimund Abraham
Special thanks to Stiftung Insel Hombroich, Lucia Hepp, Patricia Hepp, and Robin Macrander
Brands used are Khade & Genevieve Devine / Instagram: @khade.studio & @genevieve_devine
