Summer 1939. The explorer and photographer Ella Maillart and the writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach set off from Geneva by car with Kafiristan as their destination. Ella Maillart – Double Journey is the story of a special friendship, an escape from Europe, from the Geneva of 1939, already showing the early signs of what was to become the Nazi nightmare. The two intellectual and rebellious women throw themselves into an adventure. A search for the exotic, the unspoiled, the faraway, everything that can put up a wall between the East and a Europe that will be difficult to go back to ‒ so strong is the impending specter of evil.
Bigini and Lewinsky’s film was written from diaries and letters that Maillart wrote on the journey, accompanied by and superbly edited together with photographs and 16mm films taken over the long trips. Through exceptional and previously unreleased footage, Ella Maillart – Double Journey tells the story of one of the greatest explorers of the twentieth century at a crucial moment of her life. Narrated by the great actress Irène Jacob, it is a hypnotic, expansive film, a journey through the mind of a woman of heightened sensitivity who would have found it difficult to be satisfied living a bourgeois lifestyle in Geneva. Throughout the documentary (certainly not used in the classic sense of the word) there is a material and physical feeling; it is possible to perceive the feelings, thoughts and dreams of the two women during the journey.

Duccio Ricciardelli

The film has its roots in a previous project, dedicated to restoring the 16mm footage shot by Maillart. How do we present this problematic material, hardly edited, precious but mute? The wealth of unpublished archival documents suggested a critical historical edition, but then the beauty and expressive power of the images and texts imposed a different direction, a new film.

Mariann Lewinsky