For 2026, SMAFF turns its attention to music – not as a soundtrack, nor as mere accompaniment, but as a poetic proposition: IF MUSIC.
Curatorial theme 2026: IF MUSIC
The title’s unfinished conditional form signals a suspension, an uncrossed threshold. What happens if cinema becomes music? What worlds emerge when film is treated not merely as narrative or image but as vibration, resonance, rhythm, and harmonic structure? What new realities open when music is not an accessory to cinema but its very ontology?
Music and cinema are both time-based arts, yet music offers a unique elasticity: through techniques such as improvisation, dissonance, and rhythmic play, it collapses the boundaries of past, present, and future into a single field of existence. Hence, the title’s hypothetical tone becomes crucial: SMAFF will focus on music as a camera-like tool that opens up virtualities while working through conventional musical vocabularies. Editing becomes an act of drumming; the jump-cut, syncopation; the long take, a panning shot; the leitmotif, a flashback; the composition, diegesis.
If Music turns towards the resonant possibilities of polyphony, even a single note resounds with harmonics, with echoes, with the memory of previous tones. Harmony, an art of weaving together multiple voices, becomes here a metaphor for how cinema can hold multiple realities at once – not in sequence, nor in juxtaposition, but in melodic dialogue. Here, music offers a model for coexistence, attunement, and healing.
Music is vibration; vibration is space. Screenings at SMAFF will be conceived not only as viewings but as concerts – as collective acts of listening with the whole body. In St. Moritz, sound reverberates differently: it bounces across valleys, dissolves into alpine silence, and lingers in the air. Music becomes a paradigm through which cinema invents new forms of knowledge and new expressions of life, inviting us to attune, to resonate, and to step into the polyphonic fabric of reality it reveals.
If Music is not a statement but a question. It invites filmmakers, artists, philosophers, and audiences to enter a conditional mode: to imagine what cinema becomes when thought musically – when approached as vibration, resonance, and rhythm. In this mode, film no longer merely depicts the world; it begins to open doors to other worlds, dimensions, and possibilities of being.