Stefan Haupt

What's in the air? - A cinematic diary: personally anchored, at the same time political and social, with the courage for imbalance, for irritating simultaneity of inner and outer world, everyday life and state of emergency. The film spins a multi-layered web, captures feelings, thoughts, contradictory tendencies in a poetic and experimental way: an emotional reflection of this ambivalent time between powerlessness and departure.

In 1944, four-year-old Argyris Sfountouris survived a brutal massacre committed by the German occupying forces, in which he lost his parents and thirty more relatives. The Greek orphan was sent to the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, Switzerland and obtained a Ph.D in maths and astrophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Now a 66-year-old man of winning charm and melancholy cheerfulness, Argyris has forever been tackling the horror he had to go through as a little boy. He has not tried to come to terms with it emotionally. Rather, he has tried to learn to live with it and to do his utmost to prevent it from happening again. An intimate, reflective film about the quest for peace and the almost insurmountable difficulties linked to true reconciliation – an open-ended journey.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is arguably the world's most reknowned expert on the process of dying. With Kübler Ross' full collaboration, Haupt's film looks back on her life and career, from her earliest days as a triplet in 1920s Zurich, to her fame as an international lecturer and writer based in the US. Now in her twilight years, Kübler-Ross is bedbound in Arizona, and awaiting death herself. A truly fascinating film that enables us to re-evaluate our own emotions regarding life's greatest certainty, death. With the addition of archive film and interviews with Kübler-Ross' sisters and close colleagues, Haupt builds up a rich picture of a remarkable woman who has done so much to make death less of a taboo.

The story of Rafael, a fun-loving youth on the verge of manhood who is trying to make his dream of total freedom become reality. Determined to conquer the world with his Utopia Blues Band at any cost, Rafael's philosophy is that “life is a game”. But the game unexpectedly becomes bitter earnest. How much freedom is permitted?