“September Afternoon understands that the happiest moments only reveal their importance after they have passed.”

I vividly remember those long summer afternoons by the pool or at the beach, listening to alternative rock on the radio, eating potato chips and sandwiches, drinking sodas, and doing absolutely nothing. The days seemed impossibly long then. Everything was vibrant and green, the birds circled overhead making their familiar cries, and it felt as though summer would never end. As a child, you never imagine those afternoons will one day exist only as memories, but of course they do – summer ends, childhood ends, and before long those seemingly endless afternoons become fleeting memories that only occasionally return. Much like those summers from childhood, September Afternoon understands that the happiest moments only reveal their importance after they have passed.

Playing in Locarno’s Cineasti del Presente (Filmmakers of the Present) section, September Afternoon is the first feature-length film from German writer-director-editor Nicolaas Schmidt. A filmmaker previously known for shorter works, including the acclaimed FIRST TIME [The Time for All but Sunset – VIOLET], Schmidt has developed a cinema built less upon narrative than the sensory experience. He allows images, sounds, and repetition to carry the film’s plot and themes. With September Afternoon, he continues these formal interests while creating a film interested in nostalgia, impermanence, and the desire to hold onto moments before they disappear.

The film opens with what almost resembles an extended commercial for ice cream. Families crowd a packed summer beach, happily eating cones, popsicles, frozen treats of every variety. It’s comedic at times too, with some of the characters from the commercial sketch including leathermen, nuns, and scantily-clad youth. They all end up enjoying ice cream, of all sorts of varieties. The commercial may not be familiar to most viewers, but the nostalgia is ever present in the clip. Schmidt lingers on these images far longer than expected, almost forcing the audience to remember similar afternoons from their own lives. The sequence is completely archival, almost a detached prologue from the film itself, before it eventually gives way to the main narrative.

When the story begins, a family (a mother, father, and child) arrives by car at their beach cottage while Empire of the Sun’s ‘We Are the People’ plays. The choice of music proves especially inspired. “I can’t do well when I think you’re gonna leave me,” the song repeats. While referring to another person, the lyrics become about summer itself. Schmidt doesn’t just use it as a love song, but as a lament for the quickly ending summer.

The family then slowly packs beach bags, prepares towels, organizes supplies, and makes their way toward the shoreline as they meet another female friend along the path. Schmidt refuses urgency. Every mundane gesture is allowed to exist for its full duration.

For nearly two-thirds of the film, Schmidt remains committed to repetition. There is no spoken narrative and very little conventional drama. Instead, the family walks, unpacks, sits, swims, eats ice cream(!), and wanders the shoreline. In what may be his most exciting stylistic choice, Schmidt dominates the soundtrack with an instrumental passage from Billy Idol’s ‘Eyes Without a Face’ overlaid by the sounds of the crashing surf and relentless ocean breeze. This repeats every thirty to sixty seconds, time and time again, as the film goes forward. Rather than becoming monotonous, the repetitions become almost hypnotic. Schmidt transforms ordinary actions into something mesmerizing with this personal choice, which pushes the film to become a singular auteur experience.

Then, about two-thirds into the film, almost without warning, everything changes completely.

After the father falls asleep on the beach, September Afternoon shifts into something altogether stranger. Whether what follows is dream, memory, psychological collapse, or reality remains uncertain. Schmidt refuses explanation. The film suddenly expands beyond simple nostalgia into something catastrophic. The ending may represent the emotional violence of summer ending, the arrival of seasonal depression, or perhaps something far more literal. Schmidt leaves these possibilities unresolved.

The final images may be the film’s most haunting. The father, now seemingly alone at home, quietly arranges his child’s toys throughout the house. Does this represent the end of summer, the empty nest, or the mourning for a child who has grown up? Schmidt allows many nostalgic and wistful thematic possibilities to exist, pushing his film to become somehow even deeper.

Like summer itself, September Afternoon refuses to last forever. It is a film about trying to preserve something that’s already disappearing and about realizing that the moments we wished would never end have already become distant memories. Schmidt has crafted a beautiful and hypnotic first feature, one built from repetition, silence, and fleeting sensations. It establishes him as one of the major new directors, and one who can find profound emotion in life’s ordinary rhythms.