Fonotune – An Electric Fairytale
I found out about this film from a tip: Fonotune, An Electric Fairytale, directed by Fabian Huebner. It’s still being made, caught between idea and finished work. Retro-futuristic, which usually signals someone’s going to synth their way through a bad screenplay, but this one feels different.
The premise is strange enough to matter. Three characters—BLITZ, ANALOG, STEREO—with nothing in common except music. They exist in a world where no trees grow, no animals live, and people have stopped talking to each other. Completely artificial, completely hostile. Electronic fairytale feels right for it—there’s magic, but it’s broken.
The cast is Guitar Wolf, Kazushi Watanabe, Yuho Yamashita, shot across Berlin and Tokyo. It’s the kind of film you make because it won’t leave you alone, not because there’s money in it or because anyone asked. Pure vision, no compromises, genuinely weird.
What matters about work like this is the refusal to apologize for what it is. No one’s trying to explain it or make it digestible. It’s strange, it’s sincere about its own wrongness, it trusts that strangeness without worrying if anyone gets it. Most cinema doesn’t have that kind of confidence.
I have no idea what it’ll be when it’s finished. But there’s something valuable about these things existing—work that takes its own vision seriously enough not to bend it.