Europe

Messies – a balancing act between ingenuity and overload. Are you master of chaos or is chaos master of you? The film offers a multifaceted insight into the everyday lives of four messies. We embark on a trip through their jam-packed treasure chambers, discover their ingenious inventions, their dangerous tinkering and have a look around in their vast archives. We witness the conflicts they have with their relatives, neighbours and institutions that result from their being different. An intimate view of an irritating yet fascinating phenomenon.

22-year-old nurse Frédérique (Isild Le Besco) may have had enough of life, but dying isn’t much easier either. After gathering all her courage, with her gun poised at the ready, she suddenly hears a child scream. The bullet destroys Marco’s knee and the 13-year-old boy is taken to the very hospital that Frédérique works in. She tries to avoid taking care of him but slowly notices that Marco is very similar to her: suspicious, aggressive, and uncommunicative. He also hits those who get close to him, and Frédérique welcomes his hateful outbursts as a just punishment. In "A Parting Shot", Jeanne Waltz tells the story of two egocentrics whose shared journey through life leads them to see things in a new light. The film premiered at the Berlinale in 2007 and Waltz won the Swiss Film Award for Best Screenplay in 2008.

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.

«Ailo's Journey» tells the fight for the survival of a small wild reindeer, frail and vulnerable to the challenges that punctuate his first year. Its awakening to the wild world is a real tale in the heart of the grandiose landscapes of Lapland.

The film is a study of the 20th century cult of personality - the myth, the lure and the corruption of the political hero who is a fusion of two characters. Drawing from the so-called Dilessi incident of 1870 (updated in the film to the dawn of the twentieth century), this Megalexandros is a bandit of the sort that typically plagued nineteenth century Greece. Wrapped in the spiritual cloak of yet another Megalexandros - a legendary Greek liberator and King Arthur-like figure whose tale originated in 1453 under Turkish domination and has come down through oral tradition over the centuries - he becomes a leader of mysterious charisma. He kidnaps a group of English aristocrats and takes them to a mountain village where he is attempting to establish an agrarian commune among a company of Italian anarchists. The socialist hero becomes a Stalin-like tyrant whose trademark silence only reinforces his power. The film is a true work of demythification - from the roots of myth to the false promises of the new century.

“Höhenfeuer” is both a story of childhood and of a love affair: The deaf-born “Bub” and his sister “Belli” live with their parents on a remote farm in the mountains. The father intentionally resists the modern age: “I'd rather beat him to death than put him in a home”. After school Belli is not only a servant in her own home but also her younger brother's teacher. From early childhood, they have been an inseparable pair. They love one another. “Holy Mother of God, what sort of children have I?” wails the resigned mother, when the two children do things that are not “normal”. This is just the beginning of the story… Had the film been made 100 years ago – it would have been a saga.

A Nurse, a Paramedic, a Gymnast and her Coach have formed a service for hire. They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends, or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps while their leader, the Paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although the Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the Nurse doesn’t.

Cuno Amiet lived from 1868-1961, yet seen today many of his pictures have a contemporary edge. Amiet was a Swiss pioneer of modern painting along with Ferdinand Hodler and Giovanni Giacometti. The film visits three highly individual Amiet collectors in Dallas, Geneva and Studen, near Biel. Surrounded by Amiet’s works they tell us what part these paintings play in their lives.

Marina is 23 and lives together with her father in an industrial village on the Greek coast. She finds the human species to be peculiar, almost daunting, if it weren't for Bella, her only and very unconventional friend. Marina derives her first sexual insights from the animal documentaries of Sir David Attenborough - "Attenberg", as she calls him. Bella, on the other hand, shows Marina a completely different approach to her own sexuality. This leads to bizarre moments in Marina's approach to an unknown table football player, as well as in discussions with her sick father. Her dad, an architect unimpressed by the twentieth century, prepares for his self-determined "exit" from life. He considers this epoch to be overestimated and does not want to surrender to his cancer. Using these two men and their friend Bella, Marina examines the last mysteries of the human fauna.

Every ten years, one of the largest public festivals in Switzerland puts the small town of Baden in a positive state of emergency. What motivates countless people to help shape the "Badenfahrt" and make an incredible commitment? The 78-minute documentary "BADENFAHRT - FEST VEREINT" shows the emotions of those who put the festival on its feet. The feel-good movie is a plea for volunteering, for diversity and shows what positive things can be achieved together.

Summer, 1980. Barbara, a doctor, has applied for an exit visa from the GDR (East Germany). Now, as punishment, she has been transferred from Berlin to a small hospital out in the country, far from everything. Jörg, her lover from the West, is already planning her escape. Barbara waits, keeping to herself. The new apartment, the neighbors, summertime, the countryside – none of that means anything to her. Working as a pediatric surgeon under her new boss Andre, she is attentive when it comes to the patients, but quite distanced toward her colleagues. Her future, she feels, will begin later. But Andre confuses her. His confidence in her professional abilities, his caring attitude, his smile. Why does he cover for her when she helps the young runaway Sarah? Does he have an assignment to keep track of her? Is he in love? But as the day of her planned escape quickly approaches, Barbara starts to lose control. Over herself, her plans, over love.

A three-year journey with actor Bruno Ganz. He plays various roles in various places, but he also plays Bruno Ganz – filming and directing friends. Again and again he works on the role of Dr. Faust, the figure who – speaking for us all – desperately wants to discover “what holds the world together at the core”. A thousand days of searching for one's own destiny, with despair as the only companion, and placing hope in the creative power of poetry.

Is it possible to talk with animals? The filmmaker explores the world of animal communication. She wants to understand her excited dog Bina. On her international journey she meets two horse teachers, an animal communicator, a biologist, an animal therapist and the founder of The Trust Technique. Salome discovers astonishing possibilities of animal communication, whether it's with her dog Bina, other dogs, horses, cats, dolphins, or a goat.

The Kempf family lives on three different farms at different altitudes in the Schächen Valley in the Canton of URI. ten times a year they move from farm to farm with their livestock: up the mountain in the spring, down to the valley in autumn – and then up again in winter to farm their called “Pfaffen”, at an altitude of 1725 meters above sea level. This is where they feed their livestock the hav they have collected from the steep alpine slopes during the summer. The film is an intimate portrait of a family, with who the farmer's grandparents and his sister also live. Over the course of the year, the film director and the family developed a close relationship, close enough to render visible the problems of modern times in conjunction with this archaic lifestyle, problems which the farmers refuse to let get them down.

For the German artist Joseph Beuys, art was used for provocation and he wanted to "provoke" discussions with his works. He was a sculptor, performer and draftsman.

Boobs. Melons. Bazookas: American director Kristen Vermilyea has large breasts, neck pain, back pain and balance issues.
 Her decision to get a reduction triggers questions about identity, aging and bodies. Kristen departs on a series of wacky and humorous adventures before going under the knife.

Although sixteen-year-old Peter would rather lie by the swimming pool watching girls, he instead has to monitor customers in a supermarket to make sure they don't steal anything. He has problems at work, for example when he sees a suspicious customer in a supermarket but doesn't dare to talk to him. At home, he constantly receives teachings from his pedantic father; his girlfriend has laid eyes on someone else. With amateur actors and Jan Nemecek's poetic camera work, young Miloš Forman captures the authenticity of ordinary summer days in a small Czech town in the early 1960s. At the same time he expresses the feelings of awakening rebellion in the youth of the Eastern Bloc, just a few years before the Prague Spring. A seismographic film and a strong contemporary document.

This documentary takes a multi-layered approach to Saint Nicholas of Flüe. Rare witness accounts and quotations from his transmitted mystical texts, in particular the vision of the tower and the fountain, paint a portrait of a multifaceted and historically significant personality. Restored version.

Beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker Anders Østergaard, brings us close to Burma’s video journalists who insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country despite risking torture and life in jail. Armed with small handycams they make their undercover reportages, smuggle the material out of the country, and broadcast back into Burma via satellite or offered as free usage for international media.

During World War II, Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Gianni (Vittorio Gassman) and Nicola (Stefania Sandrelli) are activists fighting for Italy's liberation from Nazi occupation. When the war ends and their ideals must change, the three men take different life paths. Antonio and Nicola incorporate their beliefs into adulthood, whereas Gianni takes a more affluent job as a lawyer's assistant. When the group reunites after several decades, their discourse unearths hostility and unsettling realizations.

They don’t wear uniforms or carry weapons. They have no bodyguards, but their missions lead them to the most dangerous parts of the world. They are equipped with laptops, cameras and sound recorders. Despite impossible working conditions, they collect the evidence for indictments against those who ordered some of the most serious crimes of our time – committed in Darfur, Uganda, The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic – they are the investigators of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In the middle of the Aegean Sea, on a luxury yacht, six men on a fishing trip decide to play a game. During this game, things will be compared, measured and blood will be tested. Friends will become rivals, but at the end of the voyage, when the game is over, the winner will wear the victorious signet ring: the "Chevalier".

The theme of Fredi M. Murer's contribution to the episode film Swissmade is "Switzerland after us". Murer's episode takes place in the year 2069. An "integrated citizen with a latent tendency to become an unintegrated citizen" is commissioned by the "Brain Center" to produce a film report about the unknown mission of a foreign being. The alien being is an extraterrestrial designed by H. R. Giger long before ALIEN with a built-in camera and tape, which travels across the earth in the year 2069 to explore current conditions. The film reporter is Murer himself. Without exception, the performers in real life were authentic 1968 activists, some of whom later made political or artistic careers. In addition to this: Murer's freaky "Chicorée" with Urban Gwerder and one of the most spontious and colourful film ends ever.

Coming of age in Barrow, Alaska - the northernmost community of the United States - has become a little more complicated for the local youth than it was for their ancestors who originally named this place “Ukpiagvik” (“where we hunt snowy owls”). They are the twenty-first century descendants of a culture that has endured for millennia on this isolated, but rapidly changing tundra. The harvest of the agvik (bowhead whale) remains the heart of their culture. "Children of the Arctic" is a year-in-the-life portrait of Native Alaskan teenagers navigating between both being modern American teenagers and the inheritors of an endangered culture.

Croatia, January 1992. In the midst of the Yugoslav Wars, Chris, a young Swiss journalist is found dead in mysterious circumstances. He was wearing the uniform of an international mercenary group. Anja Kofmel was his cousin. As a little girl, she used to admire this handsome young man; now a grown-up woman, she decides to investigate his story, trying to understand what really was the involvement of Chris in the conflict

Photo?, the clown calls the public from the ring of the circus. The delicious number like the even more famous soap bubble number and other Pic classics can be enjoyed in "Le Cirque de Pic". They form the heart of Thomas Ott's affectionate portrait film. Emil Steinberger tells how he was enthusiastic about Pic from the beginning and how he recommended the clown from St.Gallen to the Roncalli Circus director. Ott reviews Pic's career. Pic himself tells how varied and romantic the spartan life in the circus caravan was. Photos show that the subtle art of the clown cannot be separated from the person Richard Hirzel, who knows how to enchant with his empathic poetry. The portrait closes with scenes from the current programme "Comical Bones", in which Pic shines as the narrator. It is Emil once again who praises Pic's subtle and expressive facial expressions.

The young Miloš Hrma, who speaks with misplaced pride of his family of misfits and malingerers, is engaged as a newly trained station guard in a small railway station during the Second World War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He admires himself in his new uniform, and looks forward, like his prematurely-retired railwayman father, to avoiding real work. The sometimes pompous stationmaster is an enthusiastic pigeon-breeder with a kind wife, but is envious of the train dispatcher Hubička's success with women. Miloš holds an as-yet platonic love for the pretty, young conductor Máša. The experienced Hubička presses for details of their relationship and realizes that Miloš is still a virgin. The idyll of the railway station is periodically disturbed by the arrival of the councillor, Zednicek, a Nazi collaborator, who spouts propaganda at the staff without success. At her initiative, Máša spends the night with Miloš, but in his youthful excitability he ejaculates prematurely before achieving penetration and then is unable to perform sexually; and the next day, despairing, he attempts suicide. He is saved, and a young doctor explains to him that ejaculatio praecox is normal at Miloš's age. The doctor recommends Miloš to "think of something else" (at which point Miloš volunteers an interest in football), and to seek the assistance of an experienced woman. During the nightshift, Hubička flirts with the young telegraphist, Zdenička, and imprints her thighs and buttocks with the office's rubber stamps. Her mother sees the stamps and complains to Hubička's superiors, and the ensuing scandal helps to frustrate the stationmaster's ambition of being promoted to inspector. The Germans and their collaborators are on edge, since their trains are being attacked by the partisans. A glamorous Resistance agent (a circus artist in peacetime), code-named Viktoria Freie, delivers a time bomb to Hubička for use in blowing up a large ammunition train. At Hubička's request, the "experienced" Viktoria also helps Miloš to resolve his sexual problem. The next day, at the crucial moment when the ammunition train is approaching, Hubička is caught up in a farcical disciplinary hearing, overseen by Zednicek, over his rubber stamping of Zdenička's backside. In Hubička's place, Miloš, liberated by his experience with Viktoria from his former passivity, takes the time bomb and drops it from a semaphore gantry, that extends transversely above the tracks, onto the train. A machine-gunner on the train, spotting Miloš, sprays him with bullets, and his body falls onto the train. With the Nazi collaborator Zednicek, winding up the disciplinary hearing, dismissing the Czech people as "nothing but laughing hyenas" (a phrase actually employed by the senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, the implicit retort to his jibe comes in the form of a huge series of explosions that destroys the train. Now Hubička and the other railwaymen are indeed laughing - to express their joy at the blow to the Nazi occupiers - and it is left to a wistful Máša to pick up Miloš's uniform cap, hurled across the station by the power of the blast. (wp)

The theater group Valendas from the Safiental in the canton of Grisons adapts Friedrich Dürrenmatt's grotesque novel "Durcheinandertal". They consider the material suitable to represent their world theatrically. The novel tells the story of a foundation that is supposed to help a remote mountain valley to prosperity. The film accompanies the creative process up to the performance in front of an audience. The Safiental is considered a "space with little potential". It is time to depopulate such valleys and leave them to nature. This is the politically pointed debate. Director Bruno Moll has adapted the book for the stage and follow the creative process from rehearsal to performance in front of an audience.

When two friends collect money for the so-called “suffering in America” in the streets of Accra, is it for fun, political provocation, or a prophecy? Two Swiss filmmakers will answer these questions with the help of seven musicians from Ghana – M3NSA, Wanlov The Kubolor, Adomaa, Worlasi, Akan, Mutombo Da Poet, and Poetra Asantewa – who have written new songs and produced video clips especially for the documentary film Contradict. Tomorrow’s ideas and trends are emerging more decentralized than ever in a globalized world. What do global developments and shifts in values look like from the ground up in Ghana and the African continent? How do we want to confront and contradict those changes? Can new visions for the future become global realities?

One of the highlights of Vera Chytilová’s filmography is the grotesque moral «Daisies» (1966). The surrealistic narrative about a pair of young women who decide to be as corrupt as the world around them does not arise from concrete socio-political realities. As a result, the biting account of conformity, petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness, and the limits of light-heartedness has timeless qualities. Daisies marked the beginning of Chytilová’s collaboration with Ester Krumbachová, who contributed to the eccentric costumes and script. The collage-like visual component then gave a lot of space for experimentation to the cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera. It is still an original gem of Czech cinema of the 1960s, which infuriated the communist officials of the time.

Paul, a ships's mechanic on a cargo boat, goes ashore one day in Lisbon and makes the acquaintance of loneliness, of keeping silence, and of Rosa, a barmaid. A three-sided relationship develops between Paul, Rosa and Elisa, Paul's wife, who lives in a town on the Rhine. All of Pauls' money is stolen, he follows the tracks of the thief and gets stabbed. Nevertheless, an in spite of Rosa's departure and the distance that separates him from Elisa, Paul gradually recovers.

Propelled from society by tragic turns, the people of Darwin (population 35) must now find ways to coexist in a place without a government, a church, jobs, or children. The near-ghost town's survival depends on a fragile, gravity-fed waterline that descends from the mountains where top secret weapons are being tested. One "accidental" drop of a bomb, they half-joke, could wipe out their entire town. "Darwin" is a documentary film de Nick Brandestini about an isolated community at the end of a weathered road in Death Valley, California, and tells the story of a uniquely American place and yet a place that is unique even within America.

This documentary portrays one of the most important museums in the world, Vienna’s Museum of Art History. An extensive look behind the scenes at this fascinating institution employs a number of charismatic protagonists and the varied routine there to show us the museum’s special world.

The war in Congo has caused more than six million deaths over the last twenty years. The population is suffering, but the offenders stay with impunity. Many people see this conflict as one of globalisation's crucial econimic distribution battles because the country has major deposits of many high-tech raw materials. Milo Rau, one of Europe's most acclaimed theatre directors, succeeds in gathering victims, perpetrators, observes and analysts of the conflict for a unique civil tribunal in eastern Congo. The documentary film brings these spectacular court trials to life on the big screen and creates an unvarnished portrait of the largest and bloodiest economic wars in human history.

A heavy-metal-loving teenager’s holiday plans fall through at the last minute, meaning he must spend the summer with the person who annoys him most: his mum. The comic actor Simon Bird makes a fine directorial debut with a tender portrait of the relationship between a prickly teenager and his mother over one summer. Beautifully played by Monica Dolan and Earl Cave (son of Nick), the two veer from loathing to love and back again as they both struggle to identify how their lives will move forward. Gentle, wry and affectionate, it marks Bird out as an idiosyncratic new UK voice.

At the far end of Alaska, filmmaker Roman Droux fulfils a dream and travels to the land of grizzly bears together with bear researcher David Bittner. The two adventurers set off for the realm of the bears to a place where there is no trace of human civilization. Surrounded by crystal-clear torrents, they experience the care of a mother bear and impressive battles of giant male bears. Roman Droux brings pictures of breathtaking beauty to the big screen. A lively nature film for the whole family.

The Swiss National Association for the Storage of Radioactive Waste plans to build a permanent waste disposal site in Wellenberg, Canton of Nidwalden. A regional citizens’ action group is formed to protest against it. Murer not only interviews supporters and opponents, in particular the Alpine farmers living on the Wellenberg. He starts by raising the question of a time-scale that is out of all proportion to the human lifespan as a measure of time. Fredi Murer dedicated the film to the “children and children’s children”, both of the farmers on the Wellenberg and of all of us. For the first time, Murer deals explicitly with the ‘can-do’ generation that lives and works as though they were the last people on this earth.

Suffering and dying do not stop even at the most powerful, even absolute ones: The Sun King Louis XIV - a parade role for the Truffaut icon Jean-Pierre Léaud - suddenly feels pain in his leg after a walk in August 1715. He spent the next few days in his chamber, continuing government business in the best possible way and gradually gliding towards his death. A historical film as a chamber play.

Max is an orphan who has been hired out to a farmer’s family. His foster parents treat him like a workhorse while their son seizes every opportunity to humiliate him. Playing the accordion is the one thing that is entirely his. But when the new teacher stands up for Max, it only makes a bad situation much worse. The only thing preserving his will to survive is his friendship with Berteli, who was also taken on to work at the farm. Max dreams of Argentina with her: a fantasy world, where allegedly even hayforks are made of silver.

The surviver of the Fassbinder family meet on Potsdamer Platz for the shooting of the Last New German Film – a remake of Pasolini’s THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM. Chaos total: Director Schlingensief, degraded to a set manager, will be replaced by an unknown, who get’s the Bundesfilmpreis award. Film as a nightmare – or vice versa. Producer Volker Spengler sends an agent (Christoph Schlingensief) to Hollywood where he meets Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad and Roland Emmerich on a mission to raise money and get ex-Visconti superstar Helmut Berger to appear in the film. Depicting a German cultural scene at the turn of the century that still has not come to terms with the legacy of New German Cinema, Schlingensief tackles the topic once and for all: with endless references both open and obscure, Schlingensief takes the process of de- and reconstruction just far enough to both completely demystify and pay tribute to an era and its heritage. With appearances from the German film, TV and theatre scene, many actors, contributors and cultural icons appear as themselves; but Schlingensief is not afraid to resurrect some of the dead, only to kill them off again: part parody, part heartfelt homage, THE 120 DAYS OF BOTTROP gives New German Cinema its final coup de grâce.

Gottfried Böhm is considered to be one of Germany’s most important architects. The Pritzker prize-winning father learned his trade from his father. At the age of 94, Gottfried still works every day on construction projects with his sons, Stephan, Peter and Paul, who are also architects. But then the family loses its emotional centre: Elisabeth – who was also an architect – wife, mother and their most important source of inspiration. Gottfried Böhm embarks on a journey to the significant buildings and milestones in his life.

Love and hate, right and wrong words, is what the film "The Dreamed" is about. The focus is on Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, who met in the post-war period. Their correspondence forms the basis of the text.

The movie is based on the autobiographical novel DIE REISE (THE JOURNEY) of Bernward Vesper. He is the son of a famous nazi-poet and life's companion of the female terrorist Gudrun Ensslin. The novel has been called «inheritance of a whole generation», because the destiny it describes stands as an enlarged and therefore recognizable example for those influences imprinting the whole generation of the sixties: Those born during the war learn how to think during the new beginning. However, instead of being able to orient themselves in relation to a fatherly ideal they see themselves confronted with their fathers' guilt.This situation leads to angry, moral demands of the children. After the hot years of student revolts it culminates in either resignation or in the blind hatred of terrorism. The film tells two childhood stories: The first one builds the framework. It narrates how a young father with his five-year old son escapes terrorism. The second story describes the development of this father, who – out of opposition to his nazi-father - gets involved with terrorism.

The internet has changed everything, also for journalism: business models are falling by the wayside, news is available for free, anywhere and at any time. I accompany journalists in their daily lives, see how they struggle, and I do what they also do: I observe and ask, also question myself, my fascination and my suspicion. I, too, use the net with ease. I am a user – and I am used.

Alphonse lives as a recluse on an Alp. Mother Nature provides him with everything he needs, and being able to live in the present is a gift for him. Monika’s attitude towards time has become serene since her near-death experience. She no longer has a fear of death, which is also sensed by the dementia patients she treats. Sam, a forester, sees the deceased. In his opinion, death only occurs on a physical level. For the Capuchin monks in Schwyz, death and dying are part of everyday life, also for Eugen, a monk and artist in Engelberg who has administered terminal care for more than thirty fellow brothers.

In a remote village nestled in the foggy hills of northern Bangladesh, Rupa fights against a predetermined destiny. With only a bike, a camera and her knowledge, she defies traditions and tries to make a place for herself in her community. When a twist of fate hits her family, Rupa’s freedom is threatened. Will she be able to maintain the fragile balance between the expectations of her loved ones and her own dreams?

Daniele von Arb was 16 years old in 1970 when he and his friends founded the revolutionary cell in Zurich later listed by the U.S. secret service CIA in its chart on international terrorism under the code name “Annebäbi”. Today he is a fortune-teller and future consultant. A hurtling journey through the armed struggle of the 1970s, entry into the cosmos of spirituality and finally, in 1989, a first class ticket to freedom.

When her mother decides to stop administering medication to her mentally challenged daughter, 18-year-old Dora awakes, as if from a deep sleep. Dora discovers her body, her sensuality and finally, sex, too. Her parents are shocked by Dora’s sudden unbridled lust for life and, when she gets involved with a man she meets at her market stall vendor job, they are furious. Seeing her relationship as unscrupulous and abusive, they demand their daughter stops seeing her lover. But their efforts are to no avail and, when Dora’s affair leads to a more serious situation, everyone has to reassess the limits of their relationship to each other, and reconsider such topics as self-determination, trust and jealousy. Courageous, necessary and sensitive – Stina Werenfels’ adaptation of Lukas Bärfuss’s stage play is a fearless and moving drama about letting go. The tender, subjective shots that capture the beauty of the world as Dora sees it are as much a part of the film’s success as is the portrait of a desperate mother, having to cope with life’s pitfalls

Capricious Summer is a Czechoslovak comedy directed by Jiří Menzel. It is based on the novel Rozmarné léto (Summer of Caprice) by the Czech writer Vladislav Vančura. It was listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was cancelled due to the events of May 1968 in France. The film depicts a humorous story of three men, a colonel, a priest and a bath-keeper, during rainy summer days.

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.

When Michèle, the CEO of a gaming software company, is attacked in her home by an unknown assailant, she refuses to let it alter her precisely ordered life. She manages crises involving family, all the while becoming engaged in a game of cat and mouse with her stalker.

Eternity And A Day traces the final days of Alexandre (Bruno Ganz), a celebrated Greek writer as he prepares to leave his seaside home forever. While packing, he finds a letter from his long-dead wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), who wrote about an enchanted summer day they spent thirty years ago. From that point, Alexandre embarks on a mystical journey through his past and present. Realizing that after spending his entire life chasing after the words of poems and novels, Alexandre wants one final chance to capture the lost precious moments of true happiness, even if only for one day.

Pensioner Roli comes to Fareed’s assistance when the Syrian refugee is faced with the burial of his Muslim wife. Together they stumble into a bewildering forest of Swiss bureaucracy to which Roli finds a beautifully simple answer.

Three players in the free market take on ethical responsibility for their actions and the following generations: they engage in sustainable production. At various stages, the film charts the careers of successful entrepreneurs who operate locally, nationally and internationally and manage to combine both the market and morality. The film examines the question of what a neo-liberal economic model could look like and presents the positions of three pioneers, who, day in and day out, balance out fair working conditions, biological production and the cost pressures of the free economy. The film presents a motivating approach to solving a situation which often appears hopeless. It emphasizes ethics and sustainability as factors for success.

In 2009 the body of Alice B is found washed up on an African beach. Next to the corpse of the white, 30-year old European woman lie those of a dozen black migrants. Eight years after this tragedy, Pierre-Alain Meier travels to Senegal in the hope of understanding the story behind this shipwreck. When he was Alice’s age, he wandered the streets of Dakar planning the production of the film Hyenas. Like her, he was a white person in Africa. Perhaps like her, he would hoped he could blend in a bit more with his African friends and co-workers and not be so unmistakeably foreign. Following in Alice’s footsteps, the filmmaker today puts his own story into perspective, with humility and affection, allowing us access to a very intimate terrain. Farewell to Africa tells the story of a final journey and sets out to explore the complex ties – both rich and asymmetrical – that have never ceased to exist between Europe and French-speaking Africa. (Luciano Barisone)

In the “Kunstgiesserei” in St. Gallen renowned artists – such as Urs Fischer, Katharina Fritsch, Peter Fischli, Mariana Castillio Deball, Paul McCarthy, Alex Hanimann and Hans Josephsohn – meet up with Felix Lehner, the charismatic founder of the art foundry. He and his crew translate ideas into sculptures with a great deal of passion and enthusiasm. Their success has led to the fact that some of the production phases had to be outsourced to Shanghai. The cultural and artisanal exchange with China is tremendously enriching. And regardless of whether in Shanghai or St. Gallen, the molten metal is spellbinding as it turns dreams into reality.

Vittoria, 10 years old, lives with her mother in Sardinia. The two share a symbiotic relationship, but then Vittoria meets Angelica, a wild and disoriented young woman. Attracted to this strange woman, Vittoria spends more and more time with her behind her mother's back until she finally learns the truth: Angelica is her biological mother. All three will have to forgive each other, accept each other and finally learn to love each other.

A volunteer fire department throws a party for their former boss with the whole town invited, but nothing goes as planned.

Danger of escape shows the story of 23-year-old Bruno Kuhn, who is sent to prison for a stupid offence into which he slips. He begins there as one of the lowest in the social pecking order of the prisoners. He is a small fish that is not taken seriously at first. But slowly he begins to accept his role. He learns to assert himself and to strike back

A large private television channel has just been established in Switzerland. A communications company is given the task of drawing up concepts for programmes and decides to buy the rights for the stories of various criminals from which to produce films. Rosemonde decides to sell her story. Eight years ago, she killed a man who tried to violate her. As there were no witnesses, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Kevin, a film producer, charges Paul, a young writer, with the task of writing the scenario relating Rosemonde's life at the time. However, she appears to be incapable of recalling her past and clams up when Paul approaches her with the questions he needs to ask her. Marie, a young actress, is then asked to visit Rosemonde and in exchange is promised the role in the film if she can make her talk. The film relates the strange relationship between the two women who begin to develop a friendship

«Francofonia» by Alexander Sokurow is the story of two remarkable men, Louvre director Jacques Jaujard and Nazi Occupation officer Count Wolff-Metternich - enemies then collaborators - whose alliance would be the driving force behind the preservation of museum treasures. «Francofonia» explores the relationship between art and power, the Louvre museum as a living example of civilization, and what art tells us about ourselves even in the midst of one of the bloodiest conflicts the world has ever seen.

The day after the night of the full moon, 12 children all 10 years of age are found to be missing in the four language regions of Switzerland. The police and the media reassuringly claim that there are plenty of leads and clues. No kidnapper comes forward to contradict them. At the end of one week, all the parents receive the exact same letter from the children, written in cryptic language. By the next full moon they must have deciphered the letter and complied with all its requirements, or else… A dramatic-ironic tale that reveals the current state of Switzerland. Switzerland as a metaphor. Or: a plea for less logic and more imagination in our world.

In 1976 a massive explosion at chemicals factory Icmesa in the Italian Seveso had devastating consequences for neighbouring communities and their environment. Icmesa’s parent company was Givaudan, which in turn belonged to Hoffman La Roche, based in Basel. Following the accident, Icmesa’s technical director Jorg Sambeth was charged with failing to keep adequate security measures. During his investigations into the true cause and background to the catastrophe, Sambeth stumbled upon facts that were damaging to those who were paying his lawyers. Yet he is sentenced to five years in prison. How should he take up his grievances with this conglomerate of companies?

One of the world’s greatest living painters, the German artist Gerhard Richter has spent over half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises and mass media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. Infamously media-shy, he agreed to appear on camera for the first time in 15 years for a 2007 short by filmmaker Corinna Belz called Gerhard Richter’s Window. Her follow-up, Gerhard Richter Painting, is exactly that: a thrilling document of Richter’s creative process, juxtaposed with intimate conversations (with his critics, his collaborators, and his American gallerist Marian Goodman) and rare archive material. From our fly-on-the-wall perspective, we watch the 79-year-old create a series of large-scale abstract canvasses, using fat brushes and a massive squeegee to apply (and then scrape off) layer after layer of brightly colored paint. This mesmerizing footage, of a highly charged process of creation and destruction, turns Belz’s portrait of an artist into a work of art itself.

The district of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean in Brussels has become world-famous as a center of jihadism, but for six-year-old Aatos and his friend Amine, it is a familiar home. Here, they listen to spiders, discover black holes, and fight about what is going to steer a flying carpet. Together they search for the answers to life's big questions. But the brutality of the adult world makes itself known when terrorists detonate a bomb in the neighborhood. Aaatos envies Amine's Muslim faith and looks for his own gods, although his classmate Flo questions him; she is strongly convinced that anyone who believes in God is completely nuts. Gods of Molenbeek is a wonderful portrayal of childhood friendship, inquiry and the creation of meaning in a chaotic time.

"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.

The movie recalls children who suffered mental and physical harm both during the last century, particularly in religious orphanages, and during the time of early modernperiod witch-hunts. It shows that the mindsets and behavioural patterns of both time periods are more alike than one might think.

From the mid-1960s onwards thousands of western hippies and flower children moved to India in search of an alternative lifestyle, spiritual enlightenment and drug experimentation. Most returned after a few months or years, but some stayed forever. Filmmaker Grossenbacher meets some of these lifers, like Cesare, a cave-dwelling Yogi, still striving for spiritual liberation. Swiss Hanspeter runs a small farm in the Himalayas, but judging by the hash pipe permanently wedged between his lips, he is no traditionalist. Then there are the South African twins who get through the day with booze and by sewing hippie clothes for both the old and new generation of Goa freaks.

In hope of a better life, two young couples leave their respective countries. Melinda and Nik leave Albania by boat for Italy, in order to be able to live out their forbidden love. Vera and Marko leave Serbia by train for Austria, traveling through Hungary. Marko, a talented cellist, has the opportunity to enter the renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But upon their arrival at the border, and even though their visas are in order, their problems begin. Despite the fact that they have nothing to do with a serious incident that took place the night before in Kosovo, and because of unfortunate coincidences, they are arrested. Their hope to realize all their dreams in Europe, synonym for the Promised Land, disappear. As is often the case with young people from the Balkans, they are paying for the previous generations' mistakes.

The first part leads us to the rehearsals of a small town brass band. Its authoritarian bandleader commands the collection of amateur musicians. Among them is the young, shy trombonist Vlada, who is thinking of sneaking away from the upcoming festival because he wants to see a motorcycle race taking place at the same time. The second part follows a group of young singers applying for the Semafort Theater. Hundreds of young girls have come, some of them talented, some not, some beautiful, some less. Some are very shy, others very ambitious. Among them is a girl named Vera, a semi-professional singer who should have no difficulties.

The experiment is a journey through the remotest time and on the smallest scale that we can imagine: an exploration of matter about one millionth of a second following the Big Bang that generated our universe. As the new experiment at CERN proceeds in its exploration of the mysterious energy that animates the universe, scientists and artists guide us towards the shadow line where science and art, in different ways, pursue truth and beauty. Some of these men and women believe in god, while others believe only in experiment and doubt. But in their search for truth they are all alert to an elusive sixth – or seventh – sense… the sense of beauty.

Western frontiers of the USSR, 1942. The region is under German occupation, and local partisans are fighting a brutal resistance campaign. A train is derailed not far from the village, where Sushenya, a rail worker, lives with his family. Innocent Sushenya is arrested with a group of saboteurs, but the German officer makes a decision not to hang him with the others and sets him free. Rumours of Sushenya’s treason spread quickly, and partisans Burov and Voitik arrive from the forest to get revenge. As the partisans lead their victim through the forest, they are ambushed, and Sushenya finds himself one-to-one with his wounded enemy. Deep in an ancient forest, where there are neither friends nor enemies, and where the line between treason and heroism disappears, Sushenya is forced to make a moral choice under immoral circumstances.

Emma has left Russia to live with her husband in Italy. Now a member of a powerful industrial family, she is the respected mother of three, but feels unfulfilled. One day, Antonio, a talented chef and her son's friend, makes her senses kindle. Director Luca Guadagnino ("Call Me by Your Name", "Challengers") thought long and hard about whether he would rather become a chef or a filmmaker. "I Am Love" is a cinematic feast that captivates the viewer from the very first minute with its hypnotic and erotic images, featuring a brilliant Tilda Swinton.

In 1968, Czechoslovakian director Jiří Menzel wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film with CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS - his first feature film ever. Only one year later his next film LARKS ON A STRING is banned by the government. But Menzel decides to stay in socialist Czechoslovakia and continues working as director and actor for theatre and film. His comedies and costume dramas are a commercial success, gently testing the boundaries of authorities with his well hidden political messages. Today, filmmakers like Miloš Forman, Ken Loach, Emir Kusturica or István Szabó are amongst his admirers and friends. JIRÍ MENZEL - TO MAKE A COMEDY IS NO FUN tells the story of this exceptional filmmaker for the first time.

The European equivalent of "The Return of the Secaucus 7," this Swiss film looks at the lives of several men and women in their 30s as they confront the slim gains of the "revolutionary" sixties. Max, a dissatisfied copy editor; Myriam, a redhead into tantric sex; and Marie, a supermarket checker who gives unauthorized discounts to the elderly, search for renewed meaning on a communal farm. The title character, a six-year-old child, is the carrier of their hopes for the future.

Drawing inspiration from the death-squad murders of several Gypsy families in Hungary in 2008, director Bence Fliegauf's chilling and unforgettable real-life horror story follows a family whose dreams of emigration and escape are suddenly, horribly destroyed.

Let’s imagine that there is a new craft, and that it is called "replacing". Let’s imagine an unemployed man who would practice such craft every day. So much so, that he would actually work beyond measure, and that he would be, in his own way, a happy man. All he does is take on, for a few hours, the role of absentees who duck - for more or less serious reasons, their official occupation. He makes do with just enough, our hero, because money isn’t everything in life: one needs to keep in shape, and not letting oneself go in times of, how to say, dark crises. Let’s imagine, also, that there is a twenty years old young man (his son) who plays the sax like a God, and is therefore lucky, as he is an artist. Let’s then imagine Lucia, restless and wary, that hides a secret behind her desire to get ahead. Will they get to the next episode safe and sound?

Paul, in his fifties, is a filmmaker. He writes a screenplay as if it were his job and starts looking for an actress for the lead role. The fact that he can't find her must be due to something: perhaps there are too many stories, too many images, too many actresses and too little peace. Perhaps it is also a necessity. Paul spontaneously throws away his script. Jean has just finished film school and is hired by Paul as his assistant. One day, Paul comes across an old photo of Dara, an Italian actress he once knew and admired, who has long since disappeared from the screen. Paul asks Jean to find her. Both of them do everything they can to bring her back to the screen. To achieve this, they embark on a world of feelings, confrontations and dreams.

LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST is a film about the void. It is a film about despair, about the failure of contemporary society. The prodigal father who figures in almost every Angelopoulos film here has evaporated into his mythical essence - leaving his children to become the wanderers in search of him. In the «chaos», two children appear, little Alexandros and his older sister Voula. In order to exorcise their loneliness, they invent a secret universe for themselves, inhabited by their dreams. Every night they go to a train station to watch the departure of a train to Germany, where they have been deceived by their mother (herself an off-screen presence) into believing that their absent father is living. One night they finally dare to get on the train. But their voyage turns out to be hazardous and pointless and disappointing. They confront suffering, physical and moral illness, jealousy, evil and death, if also love - as many ordeals and rites as initiations. Evading the half-hearted pursuit of the police and uncaring relatives, sneak onto trains, hitchhike in vans and lorries, and suffering poverty, rape and exploitation, take a dangerous leap of faith, an eerie plunge into liberation and danger. The familiar Greek landscape - the cafes, the depopulated towns and deserted beaches - are played for a strangely harsh fairytale quality, seen through the eyes of two children whose introduction to the real world borders on the surreal. The film is filled with extraordinary, unforgettable moments that are at once real and hallucinatory and contains intriguing references to other Angelopoulos' films. The children even encounter the Travelling Players now, thirteen years later, without a stage to act on, their costumes put up for sale. At the end Alexandros tells Voula the same story from Genesis that she told him at the start: «In the beginning there was chaos.» The children do finally reach the border, but of course there is no border with Germany and perhaps the river they cross is actually the Styx and perhaps their whole journey was a search for order in a chaotic world.

This is the story of a ball. A grand ball. Every summer, more than two thousand people come from accross Europe to dance together, dance even more, during seven days and seven nights, in the countryside of France. A joyful crowd of men and women from all ages, speaking different languages, beginners, virtuosos, enthusiasts. A crowd that reveals how different it is when we dare look into one's eyes, when we dare touch one another. And how life pounds.

An ode to liberated speech and to the power of words, “those one speaks to others, those one speaks in silence”, Alain Tanner’s third film is inspired by a poet and a poetic text which deeply affected him as a young director: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, written in 1939 by Aimé Césaire. A poem extolled by the Surrealists, this seminal flow of anti-colonial thinking by the West-Indian-born poet is the bubbling spring which inspires the gestures and words of the film’s main character, Vincent (François Marthouret), a 30-year-old from Geneva.Weighed down by the monotony and boredom of his life as a well-off westerner, he sells all his possessions and decides to leave for Algeria with his fiancée. The subject is clearly that of escape from one’s place of belonging, a Rimbaudesque theme dear to Tanner, which is here directly linked to the Third Worldist discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. But the strength of the film lies in the way it turns this thinking on its head: on the eve of their departure, chance circumstances prevent the couple from leaving. Instead, they decide to pursue their dream of escape by living hidden away in their empty apartment. Again, Tanner shows that it is the inner mileage travelled that matters, not the arrival at a destination; the posing of a question rather than the answer. As the director says at the beginning of the film: “Speaking words can be an act in itself, it can also be a substitute for action.” This is an important precept for the understanding of Tanner’s cinema: poetry is a form of action, and having it in mind, reciting it, can help to give a new shape to reality: in the film’s final scene, the couple decide to have a child.

Larks on a String is a Czech film directed by Jiří Menzel. The movie was banned by the Czechoslovak government. It saw release in 1990 after the fall of the Communist regime. Menzel tells the stories of various characters considered bourgeois by Czechoslovakia's communist government in the 1950s, who have been forced to work in a junkyard for the purposes of re-education.

A woman confronts her past – and invents her future. Seventy-six-year-old Elise knows exactly how she will spend the final years of her life: living with Paul, to whom she has been happily married for 50 years, in their villa on Zürichberg till her last breath, and tenderly cared for by Angela, their faithful housekeeper. But then Angela is discovered by the theatre and hired for a stage play. Paul hits a man with his '68 Maserati and subsequently becomes friends with him; Elise passionately kisses a young veterinarian.

Between 1947 and 1950, more than 80 000 Greek citizens were imprisoned on the isle of Makronisos (Greece) in reeducation camps created to ‘fight the spread of communism’. Among these exiles were a number of writers and poets, including Yannis Ritsos and Tassos Livaditis. Despite the deprivation and torture, these prisoners succeeded in composing poems, which describe their struggle for survival in this world of internment. These texts, some of them buried in the camps, were later found. «Like Lions of stone at the gateway of night» blends these poetic writings with the reeducation propaganda constantly piped through the camps’ loudspeakers. Long tracking shots take us on a trance-like journey through the camp ruins, interrupted along the way by segments from photographic archives. A cinematic essay, which revives the memory of forgotten ruins and a battle lost.

Thirteen-year-old Sandra isn't happy to be the new girl in town, but then she falls in love with Mike, the boy next door. Everything seems perfect, until the day the young couple witness Mike's mother having an affair. Mike is devastated, but what he does not realize is that his mother's ardent lover is actually Sandra's father, an old childhood sweetheart. Divided by her loyalty to her father and her feelings for Mike, Sandra decides to keep her father's identity a secret. However, she can't keep up the charade for much longer, and whatever she decides, it is bound to have serious consequences.

1.5 million Syrians have had to flee to Lebanon. Their only hope for a lasting solution is to participate in a resettlement program. Two families are on the verge of departure for Germany. But as they take the final step, fate intervenes. One of the two families will not leave in the end. When fate strikes, there is no escape. There are cures for disease, there is none for fate.

The head of a shoe factory persuades the army to hold manoeuvres nearby: So his workers can meet men at a ball. But the pot-bellied reservists are anything but attractive. Utilizing a brief hint of freedom, The Love of a Blonde throws an undisguised, humorous and tender look at Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and the ridiculousness of its functionaries.

Jesmark, a Maltese fisherman, contends with a newfound leak in his wooden LUZZU boat. Barely getting by, he sees his livelihood—and a family tradition from generations before him—imperiled by diminishing harvests, a ruthless fishing industry, and a stagnating ecosystem. Desperate to provide for his wife and their newborn son, whose growth impediment requires treatment, Jesmark gradually slips into an illicit black-market fishing operation.

Stations are islands, detached between worlds and times, cosmopolitan meeting points and junctions. "Mahatah - Side Stories from Main Stations" plunges us into this world where, almost without realising it, people scrub the stairs, set up the train compositions, look after security and sell tickets - or kebabs.

MAIDAN chronicles the civil uprising against the regime of president Yanukovych that took place in Kiev (Ukraine) in the winter of 2013/14. The film follows the progress of the revolution: from peaceful rallies, half a million strong, in the Maidan square, to the bloody street battles between protestors and riot police. MAIDAN is a portrait of an awakening nation, rediscovering its identity.

Nowadays, the wish to have children ranges between legitimate desires, primary instincts, social pressures and lifestyle choices. With a great deal of expert knowledge and impressive pictures, the film takes a candid look at reproductive medicine and its industry, as well as into the test tube. The point is, however, not to praise or stigmatise reproductive medicine. Nevertheless, the social, political and, above all, ethical implications are palpable at all times. A present-day science fiction.

Margreet Honig, eighty-four years old, is an internationally sought-after Dutch singing teacher. She teaches all over Europe and works with world-famous singers. She has developed her very own way of working, which is a pleasant contrast to the usual music education, which is fixated on perfection and performance. Her approach is therefore highly topical, also in relation to social changes in the areas of education and pedagogy.

The Swiss artist Markus Raetz is an established figure in the international art world. For the film by Iwan Schumacher, the artist from Bern is for the first time giving a camera team an insight into his 40 years of work.

Following the death of his wife, professional chef Cheng travels with his young son to a remote village in Finland to connect with an old Finnish friend he once met in Shanghai. Upon arrival, nobody in the village seems to know his friend but local café owner Sirkka offers him accommodation and in return Cheng helps her in the kitchen surprising the locals with the delights of Chinese cuisine. Gradually his cooking encourages these vastly different cultures to connect and Cheng is soon a celebrated member of the community. Unfortunately his tourist visa is soon to run out and it's up to the villagers to come up with a plan to help him stay.

Alfredo seems to lead the life of so many Ticinese families born in the valleys, who now only go back to their native village for the weekend. But Alfredo doesn’t longer experiences the journey as a form of escapism, but as an obsessive rite which is repeated over and over again. Alfredo has lost his own identity.

After 40 years Alain Tanner again travels to the port of Genoa, where he worked for a shipping company as a 22-year-old. On the back of his own memories he depicts the rough world of the dockworkers, another of those trades that has undergone fundamental changes as a result of recessions, modernisation and liberalisation. “The visual impression of the harbour and the city has changed very little, but what goes on there nowadays is completely different. The city is still as beautiful and alien and somewhat sad as before. But the port is dying, like so many other major ports. In Genoa, as elsewhere in Italy, the economic, social and political climate is highly explosive. But you also feel that things are in flow and the country is on the verge of some far-reaching changes. In this film I wanted to explore my own memories of Genoa, uncover its present and guess at its future. Genoa, this beautiful, this sad, this alien town has become for me a metaphor for society in change.”

Project initially entrusted to Maurice Pialat, who had already begun to film it under the title of “Meurtrières” (see the special edition of Les Inrockuptibles devoted to Pialat), Messidor is based on a crime story which hit the headlines in France in the 1970s: two adolescent girls run away and go on a criminal spree which ends in their deaths. On the face of it, this subject is remote from the world we associate with Tanner, since a violent story of this kind and its social background would seem to impose the realistic, even naturalistic form always shunned by the Swiss director. Moreover, Tanner is instinctively averse to filming physical violence. “Killing a person”, he says, “is generally a gratuitous special effect.” Consequently, of all Tanner’s films Messidor is the only one in which someone dies of non-natural causes. It is also Tanner’s most sombre work, characterised by a despair unmitigated by his usual verbal and situational humour. This is because Tanner accepted the project only on condition that he could recast the original idea and use this violent story as a vehicle for more personal preoccupations: the limits of freedom (already treated in his previous film) are here related to the girls’ frantic flight in the Swiss countryside. What interests him is the possible sullying of this place of excessive peace and quiet, now transformed into a field of experience and criminal fun-and-games by the two characters.

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.” Einstein. All over the world bees have been dying for the past three years. Although the causes for this are still a mystery, one thing is already clear: there is more at stake than simply a few dead insects, and a great deal more than just honey. Seeking answers, the film embarks on a journey to meet with people whose lives depend on bees: to a Swiss beekeeper living on an Alp; to the gigantic almond plantations in California; to a bee brain researcher in Berlin; to a pollen trader in China; and to the killer bees in the Arizona desert. All report on how the bees are vanishing. The film tells us about their lives. And about ours.

Nanook and Sedna are the last members of their ethnic group and live in a yurt on the snow-covered fields in the far north. Spring arrives earlier than usual, ice fishing is less productive than it used to be and airplanes make their way in the sky. Sedna also notices that Nanook is beginning to forget things. In beautiful pictures Milko Lazarov tells this calm story in gentle reference to the great pioneer of the documentary film Robert J. Flaherty with his Nanook of the North.

The film begins with a volcanic eruption that stranded the director, Pauline Julier, in a foreign city, among strangers. In turns, these strangers evoke legends about the formation of the continents, the blooming of the tectonic plates or the explosion of ash that provoked summers without sun.

No Apologies describes the state of physical and mental siege of black people living in precarious conditions in Lausanne. Confronted with the need to protect anonymity and the impossibility of filming in the street, No Apologies was conceived in a way that allows its characters to express themselves freely. Masked or barefaced, they bear witness to their personal journey, their struggle for everyday survival and police brutality. Thus questioning their place in a Swiss society that considers them as pariahs. The film is a collective project resulting from an alliance between the people directly affected by these issues and movie professionals. Given the urgency of the situation, the documentary was produced in very little time, in guerrilla mode without the constraints of institutional funding.

The story of four people trying to fulfil their most basic desires in life. A group of young people meet up regularly in a nightclub situated in a former customs house on the Swiss-French border, as a means of escape from their drab lives. NO MAN'S LAND is an “in- between” film. Between staying and leaving, between Paul and Jean, about friendship, between Paul and Madelaine, Jean and Mali, Jean and Lucie, about love. Between Paul and his route of escape, Jean and his territory, Madelaine and her music, Mali and her exile.

Andrei Gortchakov, a Russian writer, travels through Italy in the footsteps of a fellow composer to write his biography. With great sensitivity for the emotions of those who are far from their country, Andrei Tarkovski, supported by his Italian co-writer Tonino Guerra, draws a meeting of cultures and periods.

"NOT ME - A Journey with Not Vital" takes us on an intriguing foray into the eventful life and creative artistic expressions of contemporary Swiss artist Not Vital. This film essay sheds light on the work of the internationally renowned Grisons artist who for a long time remained the "well-known unknown" inside his home country. Director Pascal Hofmann traces the driving force of this restless cosmopolitan, and establishes a dialogue between the motifs in Vital's work, his childhood dreams, and the influences of his most important places of stay such as Beijing, Patagonia, Niger, "his" village of Sent in the Grisons, and New York. The film opens up visually stunning insights into Vital's perception of reality and its artistic transformation. From beginning to end, this film tells the author's enraptured exploration of the longings of an artist who came from the mountains.

This Charlie Hebdo staffer is being filmed since 2011, when the young Moroccan journalist came to France as she couldn't work in her own country anymore. We follow Zineb El Rhazoui before, during and after the attack on the satire magazine in Paris. From being a censored journalist she becomes the most protected woman of Europe. Never afraid, but then she falls in love and gets pregnant. What now?

In Offret, the last film by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, an apocalyptic catastrophe breaks out over an actor's birthday party. Former actor Alexander (Erland Josephson) celebrates his birthday with his family and some friends in his house on the coast. It's a beautiful day until the radio announces a catastrophe that threatens the whole world. In order to keep everything as it was the day before, Alexander wants to make a sacrifice, but will that help?

Two sisters and their aged father are reunited in their family home, a former village inn. They have grown estranged over the years and this meeting slowly and inexcorably brings to light the conflict between these very dissimilar women. And as their father is painfully aware, time is running out - and there is still a profound secret to reveal.

Like a mosaic, the film “Our Garden of Eden” shows the everyday life in an allotment garden area that reflects the multiethnic and multicultural modern Swiss society today. People of various geographical, religious, social and political backgrounds till the earth of their respective lots here side by side, creating a microcosm full of dreams, loneliness, homesickness, joy, family tragedies, strokes of fate and conflicts. The Swiss concept of tidiness and order meets an exotic talent for improvisation, the will to integrate and respect meet ignorance. Christians and Muslims, people from nations at enmity enjoy a peaceful coexistence in the allotment gardens, sharing what seems most precious in our society today: time, attention and space. They find the path to themselves as well as a place in the eternal cycle that life is.

On the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, the High Commissioner of the Republic and French government official De Roller (Benoît Magimel) is a calculating man with flawless manners. His somewhat broad perception of his role brings him to navigate the high end «establishment» as well as shady venues where he mingles with the locals. Especially since a persistent rumour has been going around: the sighting of a submarine whose ghostly presence could herald the return of French nuclear testing.

H.R. Giger became known all over the world as the designer of the aliens in Ridley Scott's feature film ALIEN. In this documentary about H.R. Giger's work, which was made many years before, the artist's creative process and the interplay between conscious and unconscious influences are the focus. Statements by experts and contemporaries address the question of the artist's position and social responsibility.

A former resistance fighter who is elected president of Uruguay and donates almost 90 percent of his salary to social projects: Pepe Mujica, one of Latin America's most charismatic personalities, has become known as "the poorest president in the world". He has always remained true to his ideals, having spent many years in prison for political reasons. His modest lifestyle - he lives in a small finca instead of a government palace - and his unconventional appearance underpin his credibility with young and old. Pepe Mujica represents his concerns with humour, intellect and passion, and his political commitment to a more just society attracts international attention and encouragement. Filmmaker Heidi Specogna and her cameraman Rainer Hoffmann often visited Pepe Mujica and his wife Lucía Topolansky and accompanied them with their cameras. This is how the portrait of an extraordinary person was created, who, at almost 80 years of age, has retained his courage, his wit, his humanity and his strong hope for change. "Pepe Mujica - el presidente" is an optimistic and moving film that inspires courage.

The filmmaker explores the life and work of the Austrian novelist, playwright and political activist, Peter Handke. The titles of his books sound like the tunes in a jukebox: Offending the Audience and Other Spoken Plays, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick or A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. In the 1960s, he was the definition of a “pop star” author. Yet as soon as he started making the bestseller lists, he turned his back on stardom and went travelling, taking his readers along with him, dragging them into the rhythm and precision of his language and into his own examination of reality. As a young man, and still now, in his daily life, Peter Handke never stopped asking: “Where are we now?” and “How should we live?”

June 1945. Seriously disfigured, singer Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss), the only survivor of a family deported to Auschwitz, returns to a Berlin. She is accompanied by her faithful friend, Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), an employee of the Jewish Agency. Just after recovering from a facial reconstruction operation, Nelly goes looking for her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), despite Lene's warnings. Johnny is convinced that his wife is missing. When Nelly finds him, he sees only a disturbing resemblance and cannot believe that it is really her....

Bethlehem is a neighbourhood in the city of Bern where immigrants from over 30 nations have settled. At the centre of this film is the junior team of the Bethlehem Football Club. In this team, the majority are immigrants between 15 and 16 years old. The film also portrays - along with football - their everyday lives at school, vocational training and leisure time. It questions the protagonists about their self-image, their dreams, worries and fears, asks them about what connects them and what divides them, about what it’s like to be a foreigner in their former homeland and how they get along in another foreign environment.

Jake and Mati are two outsiders in the northerly Portuguese city of Porto who once experienced a brief connection. A mystery remains about the moments they shared, and in searching through memories, they relive the depths of a night uninhibited by the consequences of time.

On the outskirts of Birmingham and the margins of society the Billingham family perform extreme rituals and break social taboos as they muddle through a life decided by factors beyond their control. At times shocking and laced with an unsettling humor, three episodes unfold as a powerful evocation of the experience of growing up in a Black Country council flat.

The film is based on an actual event, the murder of a Greek worker living in Germany by his barmaid wife Eleni and her lover Christos, who falsify the evidence of the husband's return to Germany but are suspected by a sister-in-law and eventually accuse each other of the crime. A woman murders her husband, upon his return home after a long absence, with the complicity of the lover who has relieved her loneliness. Costas Ghoussis, an emigrant recently returned to his native country, is coming back from the fields, a shovel on his shoulder. He pushes open the garden gate in front of his house and calls his wife: Eleni! She does not answer; the reason: she is hidden behind the door of the kitchen with another man, Christos, a gamekeeper, the lover that she took during her husband's absence. Just as Costas crosses the threshold he is attacked and strangled. Despite their precautions, a relative of the victim suspects them and alerts the police. The criminals confess their crime. The reconstruction is that of the examining magistrate, whose inquiries are interspersed with sequences of the crime - although the actual murder is never shown - and with a social documentary which a TV unit (including the director himself) is making about the crime and the village. From the very first sequence, audience knows who was killed and how and who did it. The film closes as it began, cutting back to the husband's return to indicate an order which has been ruptured.

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.

Claire is a single mother with a grown-up son. She’s a dedicated midwife who is completely wrapped up in her job. Although the maternity ward where she works is to be closed, she turns down a job offer from a larger clinic because she cannot reconcile their methods with her own ideas about midwifery. In the midst of all this upheaval she receives a phone call that rekindles memories of her youth. Béatrice, her late father’s former mistress, asks to meet her. Béatrice is a true bohemian – loud, colourful, egocentric and completely different to the focussed, helpful Claire. The younger woman asks herself why, after all these years of silence, Béatrice has suddenly decided to approach her for help, and is at first less than enthusiastic. Martin Provost has made a name for himself with powerful portraits of women (Séraphine, Violette). Sage Femme revolves around the encounter between two headstrong women, perfectly cast with two of French cinema’s grandes dames. A dramatic comedy about the need for change, and the question of whether steak, pommes frites and red wine is really what one would call a healthy lunch.

On the barrier island of Sapelo, two young brothers are growing up in the last remaining enclave of the Saltwater Geechee people. Their greatest joy is exploring the wilderness like their adoptive mother, Cornelia Walker Bailey, did as a child. As Sapelo’s storyteller and elder matriarch, she works to preserve what remains of this island community established by her ancestors. At the dawn of adolescence, the brothers inherit her hope, but their bond is tested as they begin to face the wider world. The documentary by Nick Brandestini was awarded the Sesterce d'or for Best Feature Film at Visions du Réel 2020.

Sarah is a solitary 17-year old girl. She struggles to connect with people, a reality her listless bourgeois family fails to understand. Sarah wishes she had a boyfriend, a friend, someone she can connect to. Instead, she struggles with depression, and perpetuating a loop that only serves to isolate her further. Yet Sarah finds an outlet in her high school drama class— when she performs she becomes someone else entirely, another character able to give truth to her most hidden desires. But sublimation through art leads Sarah down a dangerous path to a secret only she can keep.

The love story of an elderly couple. Having arrived at the end of their lives, the two 74-year-old protagonists take the liberty of making their own decisions concerning life and death. They stage their demise exactly as they staged their lives. After fifty years spent together, they don’t go because they have to, but because they want to.

During an excursion, a family from the big city discovers an old farmhouse. They spend their holidays there and would love to buy the house. The owner, an old farmer, seems to agree, only he wants to determine the time of the sales himself. In the meantime, the two children become friends with the old farmer. Tom Milne writes in Time Out: "After five years of political disgrace, Jiří Menzel was still cautious and skilfully avoided any dangerous engagements or interpretations in Seclusion Near a Forest. It is a feather-light comedy about the difficulties of living as a city family in the countryside (...). The excellent camera work casts a shimmering, summery haze over the fine mixture of tenderness and humour with which Menzel typically observes human weaknesses - making the film a magical conjuration of a lost, simpler and more relaxed world."

Suzanne is 16. People her own age bore her. Every day on her way to high school, she passes a theater. There, she meets an older man, who becomes obsessed with her. Despite their age difference, they find in each other an answer to their ennui and fall in love. But Suzanne is afraid she’s missing out on life – that life of a 16-year-old, which she had struggled so much to enjoy in the same way as her peers. Fulminant acting and directing debut by Suzanne Lindon - a bittersweet drama about the danger of living past one's own life.

Aïcha, Johan and the couple Lo Manto have taken a step in their lives that has disturbed many people around them. They have made the Muslim creed. This is the beginning of their transformation and reorientation. Aïcha moves from the rural province to the big city and euphorically follows the strict rules of her new religion. The Lo Mantos try to assert themselves against prejudices in their surroundings. And Johan? He wears a beard and flirts with his role as a devout Muslim. Or is filmmaker David Vogel just imagining it? What role does his own Jewish past play? The longer he accompanies his protagonists, the more he feels that he cannot ignore his own biography. His religious past catches up with those he thought he had left far behind.

Happy Birthday Markus Imhoof (Switzerland, 1968, 9 Min.) On his 16th birthday, Röbi Keller crashes his father's car. He tells the police how it happened. Markus Imhoof's film is an exemplary portrayal of how, in 1967, the young people abandon the ‘golden mean’ sung about by their parents' generation, which leads them into the machinery of the capitalist bourgeoisie. The leading role is played by his later cameraman Lukas Strebel. Rondo Markus Imhoof (Switzerland, 1968, 42 Min.) The documentary film deals with the problems of the Swiss penal system. It uses an individual case to illustrate the mechanisms to which a prisoner is subjected in the prison. In addition, the film shows the past life of the prisoner, his previous crimes and relapses, as well as his constant conflicts with the social environment. The 40-minute film is a collage of image sequences, photos, interview statements, quotations and sound elements. Ormenis 199+69 Markus Imhoof (Switzerland, 1969, 25 Min.) The documentary produced with the financial support of the cavalry associations draws a critical picture of the mounted troops. The film raises the question of whether this type of weapon is still timely or just an unrealistic symbol of Swiss military will.

Brewery owner Francin lives in a happy marriage with the all too beautiful Maryška. His life is turned upside down by the unexpected visit of his eccentric brother Pepin. Maryška finds a kindred soul in Pepin and falls into the modernization pull of the 1920s, to which she can't help but give in. Shortcuts, the film adaptation of a story by Bohumil Hrabal, became very successful with the audience in Czechoslovakia.

More than 500 000 Italians live and work in Switzerland. They are considered a „problem“. An over-employed economy needs their labour – a small nation of distinct peculiarity perceives them as foreign objects. They live beyond the barrier of a different language. Discussed as a problem, they remain unknown as human beings.

Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and Thomas (Eirik Sæther) are in an unhealthy, competitive relationship that takes a vicious turn when Thomas suddenly breaks through as a contemporary artist. In response, Signe makes a desperate attempt to regain her status by creating a new persona hell-bent on attracting attention and sympathy. "Sick of Myself" is Kristoffer Borgli's directorial debut and celebrated its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film combines grotesque, deep black comedy elements with subtle body horror and is a bitterly angry reckoning with the addiction to attention and the craving for recognition.

A journey into the world and the work of the great master of the South American cinema, Fernando Birri. As Birri said, it’s his "spiritual kino last will".

Casanova meets a new servant who will witness his last moments in life. From a Swiss castle with its gallant and libertine Eighteenth Century atmosphere, to his final days spent in poor and shadowy Northern lands. There, his rationalist way of thinking and frivolous and mundane world will succumb to and new, violent, occult and romantic force, represented by Dracula and his eternal power. Director Albert Serra combines enlightenment and superstition to create a dazzling conversation film.

Rike is forty, she is a successful doctor whose job demands everything of her. She intends to use her much-needed annual holiday to fulfil her long-cherished dream of sailing single-handedly from Gibraltar to Ascension, a small tropical island in the middle of the Atlantic. Her desire for a carefree holiday seems to be coming to pass but then, after a storm, her beautiful adventure suddenly turns into an unprecedented challenge when she spots a badly damaged, hopelessly overloaded refugee boat nearby. More than a hundred people face drowning. Rike tries to organise help, but she increasingly feels that humanitarianism has deteriorated into mere wishful thinking. Wolfgang Fischer’s film depicts a struggle for survival at sea which makes palpable the cruelty of the situation for people in dire straits whose fate is determined by others. The ocean becomes the scene of an allegorical, existential drama.

After her mother's death, six-year-old Frida is sent to her uncle's family to live with them in the countryside. But Frida finds it hard to forget her mother and adapt to her new life.

When a distant emergency summons the wealthy Bennett family back to the U.K., disrupting a vacation on the Mexican coast in Acapulco, simmering tensions rise to the fore between scions Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Neil (Tim Roth). The delicate balance of the deceptively close-knit clan, including siblings Colin and Alexa (Samuel Bottomley, Albertine Kotting McMillan), is irrevocably upset. Continuing his exploration of individuals and societies under pressure, writer-director Michel Franco ("Nuevo orden") ascends to the heights and depths of an Acapulco — and a family — that is more than meets the eye. Playing out in the sleek hotel suites and scruffy tourist haunts of a disparate and stratified seaside locale, and across the psychological battlefield of a precarious dynasty, "Sundown" unfolds in sharp, surreptitious bursts.

The old Portuguese Aurora and her Cape Verdean housekeeper Santa live next door to Pilar, whose purpose in life is to do good. Hardly anyone thanks her for this, especially not the notoriously suspicious Aurora, who spends the rest of her life gambling away her scarce money in the Casino of Estoril. When the old woman dies, Pilar finds the trail of an old lover of Aurora. To make films without referring to film history is unthinkable for director Miguel Gomes. And so TABU quotes a title by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau not without reason. Gomes interprets and rearranges historical motifs in his third feature film. While the first part of the film draws a society in soft black and white tones that indulges in nostalgia, in the second part it receives what it longs for: stirring melodrama, slapstick, contrasts, passion.

In THE BEEKEEPER, alienation and despair have so mestastasized in the film's central figure that he's virtually one of the walking dead. Spyros, a man soured by a secret, incestuous love for his daughter, on the day of her wedding, gives up his position as a schoolteacher, his wife, his home and his city to take up again the profession of his father and grandfather before him traveling across Greece to the town in which he was born and first learned to tend the bees, following the traditional beekeeper's route, looking for flowers that will produce the best honey, a wanderer obsessed by his job. Like a bee returning to its hive after searching for food he visits his old friends and his childhood home looking for threads to bind him to the present. He drives from town to town revisiting his old haunts and comrades relighting and reliving his history in his memory, trying to reconcile his past ideals with a swiftly changing nation that makes him feel uncomfortable. At some point he picks up a promiscuous young hitchhiker who sporadically tags along with him during his journey and seems to represent a new generation without memory and unconcerned with the past, drifting from one place to the next, flitting between the blinking lights of motor vehicles, gas stations, diners, cheap hotels and traffic signs along the dark, wet glistening roadways of present-day Greece. He becomes obsessed by her. She both irritates and entices him. What he seeks in her is a contact with the future. But for her the future is a casual encounter with the next moment. In the impossibility of their relationship there is a profound despair of a man without a future. He senses a rupture, but it's not the traditional one of the conflict of generations. It's really a rupture of language. He cannot communicate, even with love, with the body. From that comes his crisis of despair. Toward his end, he takes refuge in an abandoned cinema called the Pantheon. There, mocked by the sterile white screen above him, he tries - and fails - to bring himself to life in an attempt to connect sexually with the young hitchhiker but there can be no connection between these people from different worlds, either physical or emotional. For Spyros the past is everything, for her it is nothing. In Angelopoulos' words, «It's the conflict between memory and non-memory.» In the long run she only reminds him of his loneliness and isolation. Unable to come to come to terms with the present, betrayed by the past, wary of the future, Spyros falls back into silence and isolation and returns to his hives, abandoning himself to the stings of his bees.

Police officer Asger Holm, demoted to desk work as an alarm dispatcher, answers a call from a panicked woman who claims to have been kidnapped. Confined to the police station and with the phone as his only tool, Asger races against time to get help and find her.

It is New Year's Eve. 1976. On a Greek island a party of bourgeois hunters comes upon a body, buried in the snow and miraculously preserved by the cold. By his uniform, he appears to be one of the thousands of partisans killed during the civil war and the hunting party, a group of the ruling elite, must now decide what to do with the body. When they disinter it, blood begins to flow from the wounds in the partisan's body and they carry it back to the lodge where the inquest begins. The film becomes a biting commentary, an extraordinary allegory for the persistence of guilt in which Greece's post-war Right is placed symbolically on trial in a series of tableaux in which the hunters are faced with their re-created sins. Merging poetic metaphor and historic reconstruction each member of the hunting party views the body on the makeshift bier: the colonel and his wife, the businessman, the ex-prefect of police, now a publisher, the ex-partisan who is now a wealthy contractor, the politician, the film actress who collaborated with the Nazis, the royalist noblewoman - all are forced to give an account of their actions since the civil war. Finally, they dream their own execution by partisans but awake to find it was but a collective nightmare provoked by the dead body of the partisan. In the gray dawn they rebury the corpse and with it, hopefully, their own guilt.

In 1988 Cynthia Beatt and the young Tilda Swinton embarked on a filmic journey along the Berlin Wall into little-known territory. The film CYCLING THE FRAME is now an unusual document. 21 years later, in June 2009, Beatt & Swinton re-traced the line of the Wall that once isolated West Berlin. THE INVISIBLE FRAME depicts this poetic passage through varied landscapes, this time on both sides of the former Wall.

The filmmaker travels to the mysterious land of the “poor souls”. He visits eyewitnesses in rural areas of Central Switzerland. They offer their account of mystifying experiences in connection with the afterlife, of evil deeds by people who passed away long ago in need of atonement. The film investigates the hidden signs of mountain magic and reminds us of our own myths, ghosts and primal images. It also looks for paths to self-awareness that could be revealed to us within and under layers of centuries-old Catholic cultural sediment.

The painter from Solothurn (CH) Frank Buchser was sent to the USA in 1866 to paint a large painting of the "Heroes of the Civil War" for the future Council of States Hall in Bern. Initially Buchser was busy portraying politicians and generals in the spirit of his clients. More and more, however, he became interested in the Indians expelled to the reservations and in the living conditions of the slaves who had just been freed. Years earlier, fascinated by Moorish culture, Frank Buchser rides disguised as a Turkish sheikh to the Moroccan town of Fez, which is forbidden to Christians under death penalty. The Swiss filmmaker Bruno Moll (Pizza Bethlehem, Tunisreise) tells the two adventurous journeys of the rebellious and controversial artist. The film narrative begins with film documents of the riots in Charlottesville in August 2017 and the diary entries made by Frank Buchser in 1869, when General Lee was his model for the portrait. In a large flashback the film tells Buchser's story of his stay in Andalusia and Morocco in 1858, returns with him to his homeland and closes with his North American adventure.

While working on a story in the border area, a young journalist discovers a divided town bisected by a river which is also the national frontier. He observes a surreal wedding in which the bride and her family stand on one shore and the groom and his relatives on the other, lost under a cold sky: figure in a landscape who only delude themselves that they are masters of the earth and their destiny The town, a remote ghost town, almost forgotten at the end of the world, has been named «waiting room» by the locals because most of its inhabitants are refugees from different countries many of whom have crossed the border illegally at some time or other and are now waiting for their turn to leave and start life anew «somewhere else.» In the course of his investigation he also comes upon an aging, reclusive refugee, who lives there cultivating a field. But the young journalist believes he is a famous Greek politician who disappeared years before, leaving behind him many unanswered questions. The man's identity is never resolved but the hapless refugees and divided village allow the reporter to understand his despair over the human condition. Theo Angelopoulos weaves yet another poetical allegory on the great open questions of our turbulent age. The film is very contemporary in its treatment of borders, refugees and a changing world since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. «Being a refugee is an internal condition more than an external one, says one of the characters in the film. And later on he also says, «We've passed the borders but we're still here. How many frontiers do we have to pass to get home?» Do politicians really care? Does anyone? Finally, there is the image of the stranger standing on the bridge poised over the dividing line between the two countries. He has one leg suspended in mid air, like a stork. «If I take one more step I am... somewhere else, or... I die.»

The Travelling Players is a film of epic proportions. The action takes place during the years 1939-52 and is seen as a series of individual, often inexplicable events or tableaux, commentated by monologues, by slogans written on the walls, or by songs. It reveals the period's turbulent history while focusing on a travelling company of actors who spend those fourteen years wandering through provinces, cities and villages, performing, in increasingly threadbare circumstances, a 19th century pastoral melodrama, Persiadis' Golfo the Shepherdess. They never get to finish the play and the tranquil sheep painted on their back cloth gaze down upon generations of anguish and bloodshed. The passage of history reverberates in individual incidents or is summarized in symbols. These sad, shabby, often hungry folk, whose relationship is based on the family of the House of Atreus, are of varying political hues - from active collaborators with the Nazis (Aegisthus), to opportunists (Chrysothemis), to centrist Greek patriots (Agamemnon), to the apolitical (Clytemnestra), to left-wing idealists (Electra), to communist guerillas (Orestes). And they fill these roles as much as they do the mythic ones of wandering general, faithless wife, betrayer or vengeful son. As they travel amid the constant wartime convulsions, they begin, unconsciously, to enact parallels to Aeschylus' tragic cycle.

Vincent Fleury, a taxi driver who has been rejected by his wife, embarks on an adventure from which he hopes to benefit: in exchange for a sum of money which will enable him to pay child support for his son, he agrees to set out for Crete with an unknown person, Thelma, to help her find the ex-lover who had spurned her. During their trip across Switzerland, Italy and Greece, they flirt – but at the last minute Thelma always holds back. Vincent is at a loss to understand until he discovers that she is a trans woman who, in order to keep him with her has been lying from the very beginning. Torn between love and repulsion, Vincent has to make a choice.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a film projectionist tours through Bohemian villages and dreams of opening a cinema in Prague. He allies himself with a young cameraman (played by Jiří Menzel), who in turn has a dream: He longs for true-to-life films that deal with the reality of people. Menzel's Those Wonderful Movie Cranks is one of the most beautiful tributes to the pioneers of the silent era, and the film is also a melancholic reflection on necessary concessions.

Julián receives an unexpected visit from his friend Tomás, who lives in Canada. The two men, accompanied by Julián's faithful dog, Truman, will share emotional and surprising moments prompted by Julián's complicated situation.

A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece's pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history Thus he embarks on a search that takes him across the war-torn Balkans, a landscape of spectral figures and broken dreams, right to the heart of darkness: a damaged film archive in Sarajevo where his quest ends. Like a latter-day Ulysses he finds his «Ithaca», the missing, undeveloped film and is at last united with the work of the Manakia brothers... his gaze communes with theirs and another journey begins.

A mutual friend introduces Paul to Frédéric, who is a painter living together with Angèle, an actress who makes films in Italy. Paul wants to work as an actor and keeps his head above water with minor roles. But when he manages to land a small role in a war film, Angèle leaves Frédéric because of Roland, the film assistant working on the set with Paul. Frédéric wants a divorce from Angèle. Paul is awakened one night by a phone call: Frédéric had a fatal accident. In actual fact it was suicide: Frédéric killed himself because Angèle was taken from him.

The Film UR-MUSIG authored by Cyrill Schlaepfer is a musical journey into the remaining worlds of authentic and traditional Swiss folkmusic. It's unconventional form as a symphony of sounds, music, pictures and landscapes (soundscapes) caught the attention of the audience at it's successful premiere at the International Filmfestival Locarno 1993. After beeing showcased at many differnent Music- and Filmfestivals in Switzerland and abroad the award winning film UR-MUSIG got it's famous cult-reputation by continuous screening of more than 2 years in Zurich.

The 36-year-old Swiss artist Urs Fischer, who lives in New York, has been enjoying international fame for some years now. This documentary follows him during the preparation of his exclusive exhibition in an American museum and thus takes us into the daily life and work of an artist.

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?

Amidst the preparations for her 35th wedding anniversary, Meredith is surprised by the discovery that she is HIV-positive. Only her husband André could have been the carrier of the virus.

Vitus is a boy who almost seems to be from another planet: He has hearing like a bat, he plays piano like a virtuoso and studies encyclopaedias at the age of five. No wonder his parents begin to anticipate a brilliant future for him. They want Vitus to become a pianist. However, the little genius prefers to play in his eccentric grandfather’s workshop. He dreams of flying and of a normal childhood. Ultimately, with one dramatic leap, Vitus takes control of his own life…

The film is about gluttony, with the topic of eating also serving as an example for other metabolic processes. The starting point of the playful collage is the energy theorem: "All natural processes are only energy transformations, but never energy production or energy destruction." Physical life, however, functions according to the pleasure principle, the aim of which is to generate as much pleasure as possible. But what if the pleasure of one leads to the loss of the other, since the sum of the supplies remains constant? This is decided by the right of the strongest, then one must starve or be eaten.

What happens when fathers do more family work than mothers? An overview of families where traditional roles have been reversed. The director's experiences with children are reflected in the film in the form of short animations.

Cythera, in Greek mythology, is the isle of dreams where one can dedicate oneself to happiness (or the pursuit thereof). In this quest within a quest, the tale of the father's return is told as if from the point of view of his son Telemachus and as if Telemachus were a filmmaker, as well as a middle-aged man with a son of his own. A film director, tired of the illusions and fictions of his profession, searches for a story of substance by attaching himself to an old man, a recently returned political exile. The man, away in the Soviet Union for 32 years and now stateless, finds himself at the beginning of a journey, not the end, and Angelopoulos evokes the past, present and future to bridge the gap between reality and the imagination. VOYAGE TO CYTHERA is about an old man - the country's leftist past - who cannot become reconciled to his country's present or perhaps it is Greece that is not ready to come to grips with its past. In the end the old man is set adrift on a raft headed away from Greece into international waters, with no home to steer toward, joined by his wife a latter-day Penelope who, despite the fact that this man is more a stranger than a husband to her after so many years, chooses to share the rest of her life with him and in doing so accepts all of his past, his sorrow, his politics and his failed dreams. It is a journey to the dark side of Greek history where it crosses paths with myth.

The Future Circular Collider is the machine of the future. Thanks to it, we will finally be able to go back in time to the origin of our universe. But which way do we go to set up the largest scientific instrument of all time? Between metaphysics and underground tunnels, a story of the preparations or how men are ready to move mountains for more knowledge.

A film about people who have fought for more freedom and justice – and have had to pay dearly for it. The two women and two men from Tibet, Congo, Chile, and Turkey now live in Switzerland. In their native countries they were badly tortured for their human rights efforts. Nevertheless, they have not lost their belief in a better world.

A group of German construction workers start a tough job at a remote site in the Bulgarian countryside. The foreign land awakens the men's sense of adventure, but they are also confronted with their own prejudice and mistrust due to the language barrier and cultural differences. The stage is quickly set for a showdown when men begin to compete for recognition and favor from the local villagers.

Wild Plants are plants that seed themselves on fallow land, take possession of seemingly uninhabitable terrain and create new habitats. But wild plants are also people who create their own utopias and become impulse generators for others. People live in many scattered places around the world and projects are growing in which botanical and biographical uncontrolled growth are combined.

Two friends – Paul Girard, the “people’s mayor” of Delémont who has his sights set on a national career and Liu, a Chinese watchmaker living in the Jura – decide to organise the semi-finals of the Miss China competition in Switzerland. Paul is hoping this original, media-hyped project will help him acquire the image his party has been refusing him: that of future deputy. Liu, meanwhile, hopes to open the Chinese market to luxury watches. Instead of the heroes’ welcome they were anticipating in bringing the women to the touristic Meccas of Switzerland, the two partners are met with resistance from the political milieu and indifference from their sponsors.

Resemblances can be unnerving. Such as the one between the viscount who went, puffing on his pipe, to the guillotine during the Terror, the army chaplain who has a brigand's tattoos on his chest and is a compulsive baptizer of soldiers, pillagers and rapists, the Parisian down-and-out left as flat as a pancake by an encounter with a steamroller, and, last but not least, the cultivated concierge—and occasional arms dealer—in an upscale building. Almost all the film's characters meet in that very building except, of course, the homeless, who are carted by the cops from pillar to post. Yet amid all this chaos, there are dream spaces, love stories and solid friendships that perhaps allow us to hope that tomorrow will be better than today.

An ethnographic documentary film in three movements, along the lines of a symphony. The three movements reflect the three differing stages of development co-existing within the mountainous canton. In Göschenen, at the foot of the Gotthard, which straddles Europe’s North-South axis, industrialization took hold long ago, and the mountain farmers of old now work in offices and factories. In the Schächtental, however, the traditional family-centric mountain economy survives. Meanwhile, the village of Bristen in the Maderanertal is in the throes of upheaval: while the traditional farming communities still exist, nigh on 250 inhabitants leave the area daily to go to work or school.

A documentary film about Swiss musician and singer/songwriter Stephan Eicher, his Yéniche roots and the history and persecution of the Yéniche people in Switzerland and their links to Swiss music.

Situated halfway between Bern and Biel in the foggy Lyssbach valley, Suberg has gone from a sleepy farming village to a dormitory village over the decades. The filmmaker was born in Suberg and has lived there all his life, successfully ignoring the village and its inhabitants for 32 years. When he was in primary school, his friends were from Suberg. Nowadays they live in Zurich or Berlin and the evenings in the countryside are becoming lonelier. As a result, he now wants to become part of the village community. But how do you get to know the inhabitants of a village that has closed all of its meeting places?

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.

An artist, a musician, a filmmaker. Three worlds, three ways of thinking, three interpretations. Fused to an energetic work. Beat Zoderer’s work fascinate with quiet humor and the intelligent challenge of distrusting a conventional view of things. Nik Bärtsch’s sound is characterized by his love for the architecturally articulated space and rhythmic overlaps. Filmmaker Jürg Egli has brought the two artists together in a studio session. The result is a cinematic performance of unique intensity. „The idea can sometimes only be thought out in its realization.“ Beat Zoderer Sketchbook IX 1999