"Grauzone" is the film by Fredi M. Murer that anticipated the 1980s movement in 1978. A mysterious epidemic haunts Switzerland. The symptoms: a sudden urge to go outside, sudden melancholy, general sensitization. An unintentionally published advertisement informs about the wave of illness and triggers uncertainty, which also penetrates the uniform suburban idyll of Zurich. Julia and her husband Alfred live here, who, in addition to his work as a commercial employee, leads a double life as an eavesdropping specialist and is increasingly plunged into a crisis of meaning.

On his expedition into the heart of Switzerland, Swiss filmmaker Matthias von Gunten met six people whose lives and everyday lives, their small and big fates fascinated him. At first glance, they have nothing to do with each other apart from living in Switzerland: six very different people, their attempts to master everyday life and their individual escapes from reality. In the course of this one year, in which von Gunten visited them again and again, a lot happens in the lives of these people. On these surprising journeys, Von Gunten traces the absurd and dramatic behind seemingly normal everyday life. Thus, little by little, an exciting time picture emerges in which each of these people has their place. The six people, their fears and dreams, their hopes and failures create an atmospheric picture of our lives today. To face or escape the much disdained Helvetic narrowness: there are different possibilities - the six people in Matthias von Gunten's film live some of them.

María, a 17-year-old Kaqchikel Maya, lives with her parents on a coffee plantation at the foot of an active volcano. She is set to be married to the farm’s foreman. But María longs to discover the world on the other side of the mountain, a place she cannot even imagine. And so she seduces a coffee-harvester who wants to escape to the USA. When this man leaves her behind, María discovers her own world and culture anew. Director Jayro Bustamante grew up in the region of the Kaqchikel Maya in Guatemala and returned there to make his film. He held workshops, asked people to tell stories from their own lives and examined the current living conditions of the Maya at close range. In doing so, he learnt about the special connection the women there have with the rituals of their mothers and grandmothers. The plot picks up the rhythm of a life defined by ancestral beliefs and traditions. An unfamiliar daily routine awaits the audience, far from the globalised world. IXCANUL is not a film about Indigenous culture but one that was developed from within it.

An absorbing portrait of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova which is brimming with metaphors and dreams. Parajanov created a melting pot based on the Armenian and Georgian cultural traditions with their rich religious symbolism and the expressive powers of cinema, the modernist folk art of the 20th century. This classic by Parajanov is not a dramatised portrait of the poet Arutyun Sayadyan, better known as Sayat-Nova (the King of Songs’), but an associative portrait full of metaphors and dreams, arabesques and still lifes. It is a film designed like an oriental tapestry: quirky and unpredictable in line and colour, but at the same time expressive of great aesthetic harmony. The Color of Pomegranates is also a statement about the Messianic role of the artist, in this case the filmmaker Parajanov, who regarded this film as his finest.