Discoveries from Switzerland World Cinema

Two doctors in Victorian England use manual stimulation of female genitalia to cure their patients' ills, leading to the invention of the vibrator.

A passionate hotel manager is obsessed with a clairvoyant's claim that he is to blame for the unexplained fire at his legendary grand hotel. To free himself from this burden, he teams up with an astute detective inspector to expose a former employee as the arsonist. This unexpectedly puts him at the centre of the investigation – and he must face the truth.

Haroun is an old bachelor who has lived in Oran for several years. A retired civil servant, he leads a reclusive life until the day he meets Kamel in a bar—a journalist to whom he tells an incredible story dating back to 1942. He claims to be the brother of ‘the Arab’ killed in a story told in one of the most famous novels of the 20th century, ‘The Stranger’ by Albert Camus. An Arab with an erased name: Moussa. Through anger, assertions, details, and confidences, Haroun finally convinces the journalist to listen to his story. His confession is a cry of freedom and distress—but above all, a cry of revolt: against an abusive mother, against a country that failed to achieve true independence, against a book, and against a famous French writer.

April, an idealistic lawyer dedicated to lost causes, agrees to defend Cosmos, a dog that has bitten three people, leading to the first canine trial. She has no choice but to win the case, as otherwise, her unusual client will be put down.

August 2019. Frank recognizes his own story of twenty years ago in a recently published book. He remembers Marie, with whom he had a relationship before she moved to the United States and disappeared from his life. Frank sets out in search of her and finds himself in a USA petrified by a heat wave and lost in suspicion and political paranoia. He heads into the desert in pursuit of Marie.

16-year-old Maria is forced into Serra D'Aires convent, secretly run by Satanists.

An "adults only" retelling of the legend of the Three Musketeers.

Three women head home to collect their inheritance, but they stumble upon a group of witches trying to bring their vampire leader back to life.

Two friends named Gerry become lost in the desert after taking a wrong turn. Their attempts to find their way home only lead them into further trouble.

Sixteen year old Bibi comes to her aunt Toni's boarding house where she is seduced by lesbian women.

After an elaborate application process, Empress Elisabeth of Austria hires Countess Irma as her new lady-in-waiting and takes her to her summer residence on Corfu. As the two women become closer there, this soon leads to tensions back in Vienna.

A woman who has recently discovered that she is the daughter of Angelo, a major mafia boss, decides to wreak vengeance when he is killed by a hitman. She's aided by his faithful bodyguard, with whom she soon falls in love.

Johannes, a doctor of physics, travels with his doctoral supervisor to a scientific congress in the Alps. A series of mysterious incidents occur on site. He meets Karin, a mysterious jazz pianist who seems to know more about him than she can know. Suddenly, mysterious deaths begin to pile up and Johannes tries to uncover the secret under the mountain.

This 70's soft-core sex comedy chronicles the exploits of several flight attendants whose favorite perk-of-the-trade is the ability to flit from one sexual adventure to the next. The mile high club takes on a new meaning as the swingin' German heroines make their way throughout Europe.

A comedy set on New Year’s Eve 1999 in a luxurious hotel in the Swiss Alps where the lives of various guests and those who work for them intersect.

A mysterious writer is involved in a love affair with his stepson's wife, leading to a web of intrigue and desire.

Merette is a pretty child, living within a patrician, strictly Calvinist family in the Switzerland of the 19th century. She is happy, until her mother dies, and Merette blames God, and gives up her religion. Her family turns against her, the villagers reject her, and her priest drives her into isolation.

Papers, photographs, sketches, tubes of paint and canvases litter Francis Bacon’s London studio. It’s a place where friends, lovers and eccentric figures pass through, haunting his canvases after a mysterious creative alchemy. Bacon explains in French his carnal relationship with his canvases, the painters who inspire him, and his relationship with alcohol, violence and death. He talks about his homosexuality, his personal life and the way it spills over into his painting. An exceptional portrait captured on the spot, over the course of a rambling, inebriated conversation.

A three-chapter (Hell, Purgatory and Paradise) meditation on the city of Sarajevo in the wake of the Bosnian war, on Palestine and Israel, and on war itself.

A thrilling mystery that unfurls in the alleys and on the rooftops of the French capital, Paris, over the course of one adventurous evening.

1975, Swiss Alps: In a remote mountain village, a beautiful and mysterious woman shows up. Only the village policeman takes care of the strange woman and tries to find out who she is. There are hints that she came from the Höhenalp Alp, where herdsmen do unthinkable things to get the company of women. Many dark truths are revealed that should better have remained hidden. A tragedy of lust, insanity and murder is brought to a seemlingly pure and perfect world. It is the beginning of a nightmare of religious insanity, hypocrisy, abuse and belief in demons, who destroys a young family and brings a whole village to destruction.

Maria, an unfortunate young woman, kills her rapist father in self-defense, and is later tried, sentenced, and shipped off to a woman's penitentiary where she and her fellow inmates are subjected to psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of a psychotic lesbian warden.

Two aging crooks are given two weeks to repay a debt to a woman named The American. They recruit their recently deceased partner's son to help them break into a laboratory and steal the vaccine against STBO, a sexually transmitted disease that is sweeping the country. It's spread by having sex without emotional involvement, and most of its victims are teenagers who make love out of curiosity rather than commitment.

11-year-old Pola and her best friend Polly spend all their time at the local outdoor pool, Plitsch Platsch, where Polly's parents run a café. When the pool is closed due to budget cuts and Polly's family moves away, Pola suddenly finds herself alone. Refusing to give up, she teams up with her clever new classmate Rosalie to try to save the pool. Together, they start a petition and rally with the local children. Along the way, Pola discovers new friendships and learns that change is a part of growing up.

When a young European woman assumes a false identity in 1920s Argentina, she gets more than she bargained for.

To avoid losing custody of her six-year-old daughter in Manila, Luz, an undocumented Filipina cleaner working in a luxury Swiss ski resort, must earn money at any cost – even if it means transgressing her own moral limits.

A veteran actress comes face-to-face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself when she agrees to take part in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog combs through the film archives of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft to create a film that celebrates their legacy.

In a dystopian Switzerland that has fallen under the fascist rule of an evil cheese tyrant, Swiss mountain girl Heidi transforms herself into a kick-ass female fighting force who sets out to liberate the country from a cheese-fueled machinery of hate.

After the liberation of Auschwitz, an Italian prisoner of War begins a torturous voyage home to Turin, through a Europe caught between war and peace.

A daughter torn between two mothers, one who raised her with love and her biological mother, who instinctively claims her back.

Young women imagine themselves as a river: what starts off as a poetic metaphor is linked to images of landscape and becomes a many-voiced narration, radically morphing into a political statement. The Kazakh woman, she prefers life without man.

Pirates take over a lighthouse on a rocky island. They then execute a devious plan to cause ships to run aground, pillaging their wrecks. A lone member of the lighthouse crew survives, and he deperately fights their plot. A shipwrecked maiden that avoids the pirates slaughter soon complicates the situation.

Jeff, a mental health patient in a clinic high in the Swiss Alps, escapes to his only friend Morton, while Prisha, the daughter of Indian guru Majula, mysteriously enters Jeff’s life. After an argument with Morton at his bakery where the fugitive wanted to start over, Jeff moves on and visits a monk who gives workshops for enlightenment in the Balkan mountains, in search and full of hope for redemption. Still haunted by his past, Jeff must run again and travels with Prisha, who secretly followed him, to India to find a new life and to get her father’s blessing for the two now in love. Can he fulfil his dream?

The story of CARGO takes place on rusty space-freighter KASSANDRA on its way to Station 42. The young medic LAURA is the only one awake on board while the rest of the crew lies frozen in hibernation sleep. In 4 months will Laura's shift be over.

Johnny Suede (Brad Pitt) longs to be a teen-age idol like Ricky Nelson. He has a pair of black suede shoes, an impressive pompadour, a guitar, and some pals who will play backup for him. Yet he doesn't have much talent or drive.

Thirtysomething Chinese-born Lina borrows money to move to Paris to save up money to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams, leaving behind her husband and son in Liaoning province. But once in Europe, nothing goes as planned, and she is forced into a line of work she never would have imagined. When her flighty sister-in-law shows up on her doorstep, Lina becomes inevitably tangled in her own web of lies.

Russian Federation, December 31, 1999. After President Boris Yeltsin's unexpected resignation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin becomes acting president of the country. From that day and for a year, Vitaly Mansky's camera documented Putin's rise to power. The story of a privileged witness. The harsh explanation of the reason why politics is the art of possibility of achieving the best with the support of many, but also of giving the worst in return.

A stubborn professor who becomes consumed by desire when he forms a bond with his best friend’s daughter who is tasked with taking care of him.

English-language adaptation of Albert Cohen's epic Swiss tale of a tortured love affair between a high-ranking Jewish official and the Protestant wife of one of his employees.

Two soldiers from opposite sides get stuck between the front lines in the same trench. The UN is asked to free them and both sides agree on a ceasefire, but will they stick to it?

Margarita is found, naked and bloody in a luxurious house and is promptly taken to a mental institute. The doctors and nurses meant to take care of her aren't exactly who they seem and a mysterious figure, clad in black, circles the premise at night, offing nubile young women.

Pomme is a meek and mild French beautician whose life takes a fateful turn during a vacation to Normandy. She becomes the lover of middle-class literature-student François. The relationship sours when François takes her home to meet his parents, thanks in no small part to their differing social backgrounds.

15-year-old Mia faces an overwhelming transformation which puts her entire existence into question. Her body is changing radically, and despite desperate attempts to halt the process, Mia is soon forced to accept that nature is far more powerful than she is.

An ecological drama/documentary, filmed throughout the globe. Part thriller, part meditation on the vanishing wonders of the sub-aquatic world.

On 11th January 2008, hired by the City of Cleveland, lawyer Josh Cohen and his team filed a lawsuit against 21 banks, which they held accountable for the wave of foreclosures that had left their city in ruins. Since then, the bankers on Wall Street have been fighting by with all available means to avoid going to court. This film is the story of that trial. A film about a trial that may never be held but in which the facts, the participants and their testimonies are all real: the judge, lawyers, witnesses, even the members of the jury - asked to give their verdict - play their own roles. Step by step, one witness after another, the film takes apart, from a plain, human perspective, the mechanisms of subprime mortgage loans, a system that sent the world economy reeling. A trial for the sake of example, a universal fable about capitalism

The story is about Daneli and Heidi, who unexpectedly meet again 30 years after their separation and are given the chance to change their past.

Dr. Anansa Linderby is kidnapped in a medical mission in Africa by a slave trader. From this moment, her husband will do anything to recover her and to punish the bad guys, but that will be not an easy task.

In a world almost like ours, Jonah works for an agency that offers human relationships. When he's hired to serve as Nika's father, he begins to lose control of his tightly controlled life.

Charlie and Tom have been a couple for fifteen years. Now in their thirties, they want to take the next step and get married - and get cold feet: What if they later regret never having lived it up? A story about the challenges of love in a world where one click is enough to reshuffle the cards.

Two spirits encounter each other in a limbo – a place between the earthly and the beyond. The two spirits are still trapped in their human shells, but have already lost the ability to speak. They will only spend a few days in limbo, before a wandering light leads them to the next world.

For 30 years, a doctor from Paris has maintained a friendship with a fisherman on Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated inhabited island in the world. Now he travels back one more time, with the plan to stay there for good.

Hulya is a young Turkish woman torn between two cultures. Forced to live with her uncle in Turkey, she leaves this house: she wants to return to Germany where she lived with her father and went to school, not so long ago.

Henry IV usurps the English throne, sets in motion the factious War of the Roses and now faces a rebellion led by Northumberland scion Hotspur. Henry's heir, Prince Hal, is a ne'er-do-well carouser who drinks and causes mischief with his low-class friends, especially his rotund father figure, John Falstaff. To redeem his title, Hal may have to choose between allegiance to his real father and loyalty to his friend.

The life and death of the Scottish monarch.

A private eye who's over his head in debt takes on a job snapping photos of his client's rich husband in bed with another woman. But when the husband winds up with three bullet holes that seem to have come from the private eye's own gun, he's got to prove he's not the murderer meanwhile getting tangled deeper in a web of deceit, lies, and steamy night club dancers!

Inspector Lavardin is called to a provincial village to investigate a murder – only to find that one of his ex-lovers is the victim’s widow.

Chronicles the fate of Frieda Keller, a young seamstress in St. Gallen who, in 1904, is accused of murdering her 5-year-old son Ernstli.

A 14-year-old video enthusiast obsessed with violent films decides to make one of his own and show it to his parents, with tragic results.

An unhappy family in a remote village in Calabria: Luisa is at war with the world since day one. She is juggling odd jobs, her love for her children and granddaughter, and her feuding with her mother, brother, and sister-in-law. While the two women exchange insults and call in the cops, three elderly aunts, a tragicomic chorus, try in vain to keep the peace.