Weaving Anni Albers (2025) Short Film Review: On Hearing Textiles and Seeing Their Touch

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To distill the practice and the creative process of one of the most inspiring designers of the 20th century and pioneer artist of the Bauhaus in a way that pays homage to her legacy, while simultaneously restituting the depths and the essence of her ethos, is, at the very least, challenging. Even more so within the framework of a short film. Yet, in “Weaving Anni Albers,” Alessandro Del Vigna marks his own directorial debut with an enthralling, compelling piece that gracefully positions itself far beyond a mere contemplative tribute. In fact, he manages to create a multisensorial, affectionate ‘response missive’ to her idiosyncratic weaving language, and let its essence reveal itself organically by way of the filmic verb.

Indeed, it’s almost as if the young Italo-Romanian director, who already boasts an impressive résumé as a producer – his name being on prestigious international productions including Ruben Oestlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” Kent Jones’ “Late Fame” and Karim Ainouz’s upcoming “Rosebush Pruning,” just to name a few – had found a way to communicate harmoniously with the materic yet intrinsically spiritual heart of Anni Albers’s weaving language, beyond linear time and space.

Through a sequence of recurring symbols and organic associations between image, sound, and material, pushed nearly to abstraction, he reveals the alchemical core of her practice. The film traces her devotion to testing the limits of materials—their resistance, texture, and latent expressive force—and to a weaving process in which harmony is not imposed but slowly drawn out of disorder.

As a result, the 10-minute film, produced by Start and the renowned luxury fabric house Dedar, in collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, flows hypnotically through oneiric associations and corporeality, flesh and thread, textile processes and pages of the undeciphered Voynich manuscript – all interwoven, by way of archive footage, like Albers’ very own looms and threads, in a profoundly mysterious and successful attempt to reach the Intrinsic Order and the essence of weaving through transformative distillation.

Much like Albers combined art, craftsmanship, and design in one unique creative process, Del Vigna here undoubtedly aims at unity through the preservation of all those sensorial singularities whose combination generates more than the mere sum of their parts. A lens lingering rhythmically on the very concrete and tactile of the machines and of the fabrics meets the very ethereal and spiritual of the meditative sequences and evocative soundscapes and voiceover.

Opposites not only meet but also, and more importantly, merge, as if one could almost hear the fibers and see their touch. Through such a process, magic appears in the form of a final return to the essential heart of the Matter. That is precisely why, whilst watching – or rather, absorbing – the film, and letting it percolate the conscience, one crucial phrase, famously stated by the leading Bauhaus artist, resonates more than others through the piece: ‘The weaving is a form of clarification’. Indeed, the Italo-Romanian director seems to have made the entire short a very accurate crystallization of this concept.

Sound has a crucial role in his work, and it comes through a narrator and an original score. Thus, actress Greta Bellamacina’s voice, a pilgrim and a guide in the journey, beautifully conveys Anni Albers’s graceful force and wit. Through it, the German artist’s reflections on weaving, the inner logic of textiles, and the nature of art and design become the thread guiding the viewer through a dense network of images and associations. These elements are arranged to sharpen perception rather than overwhelm it. Meanwhile, Simina Oprescu’s electroacoustic score weaves its own pattern of resonances, drawing the ear and the mind into a space where matter and sound meet.

Interestingly, Oprescu’s work seems to come from the very resonant act of letting the threads do the talking and the guiding through the sonorous fibres of their own inner structure – something the Bauhaus artist would have approved of. Her field of sound, therefore, unfolds through rhythms becoming substance and presence, combining all the senses into one, immersive sonic experience.

“Weaving Anni Albers,” which premiered in competition at the Ji-hlava International Film Festival, seems to quickly – and rightly – become a cult favourite, with further screenings planned all through 2026. It has since been shown at the Paul Rudolph Institute in New York, the Lo Schermo dell’Arte Festival in Florence, and, more recently, on 21st January 2026, at the Maysles Center in New York, within the framework of an evening dedicated to both Alessandro Del Vigna and the incomparable Meredith Monk.

It’s a frankly deserved testament not only to the sensibility with which Alessandro Del Vigna has approached the sacred yet very concrete mystery of Anni Albers’ revolutionary language for textiles, but also to his ability to inhabit its original matrix through other mediums. Much like musicians or poets often and famously better communicate messages and feelings to each other through compositions rather than ‘ordinary’ word messages, the director has, ultimately, composed a sort of love letter from an artist to another, telling her he sees her, breathes her, feels her, and has embodied – even translated – its lessons. Decades later, this, too, is what makes the formidable legacy of Anni Albers special, as well as beautifully alive.