Discoveries from Switzerland World Cinema

Brothel-owner Chikita Hausmann is forced to flee a South American revolution and sets up a new “house of pleasure” in a sleepy Swiss town, where the local bigwigs queue up so enthusiastically that she placates scandalized wives by dubbing it the “Circle for Expanding Cultural Relations” and wins the naive estate-manager Philip Sprüngli’s heart. When a nearby jazz club run by local youths threatens to expose her clientele, Chikita cleverly sells her establishment to the municipality—transforming it into a youth center—then whisks Sprüngli off on another adventure to a revolution-torn South America.

Roger is a young, dashing banker full of boyish self-confidence. He has a highly successful business, smuggling black money across the border for reinvestment. But then a split second reaction changes his entire life. Flagged down one day by a customs officers, Roger loses his cool and makes a run for it. His only means of escape: diving headlong into Lake Constance, thereby catapulting himself out of his life as a banker and into a totally new universe, populated with shy mermaids decked out in Lara Croft gear, and cunning magpie witches in helicopters. As in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, Roger has to pass three tests to cast off the witch’s curse and find happiness. His underwater journey through an intoxicatingly beautiful Switzerland is enhanced by the enchanting songs of sirens – a fable full of lust for life and love.

Adrien is a cop. One night, during an intervention, a tragedy happens and he ends up nailed to a wheelchair. Because of this accident, his relationship with his wife, Barbara, seriously deteriorates. The couple is in a crisis. Hoping to work on their relationship, they take several days off in Adrien's father's cottage, a small place lost in the mountains. Adrian remains bitter, mentally destroyed by his physical condition. Barbara is frustrated and disappointed. She feels that Adrien has given up. A gang of poachers hunting nearby will exacerbate Barbara's feeling of helplessness.

This is the story of Kunsang Wangmo, a 100-year-old Buddhist nun exiled from Tibet in 1959 to escape the Chinese occupation.

Thomas is an arrogant and merciless businessman who live in a universe of luxury.Mathilde is a very sensible and insecure woman who recuperates a lot things in the dustbins.This day Thomas was driving his mountain bike through a park, Mathilde was with her friends Nathalie and Patricia and she was trying to drive a car.Suddenly Thomas shocked the car driven by Mathilde,flies in the air and falls down: he remains unconscious some minutes and when Patricia asks him his name he answers that he has lost his memory.They carry him to an hospital where the doctor makes an medical examination.Patricia doesn't want to have problems and goes away.The doctor says that Thomas needs to rest and Mathilde accepts to invite him for a night in her apartment.When Thomas was jumping above the car, he lost his cell phone and his colleague is calling him.

IVUL is the extraordinary story of Alex (Jacob Auzanneau), a young man who climbs on to the roof of his house and refuses to ever come back down to earth. His actions devastate his beloved family and we watch as their world falls apart. A dark and mysterious gardener (Tchili from This Filthy Earth) keeps watch over the family but is powerless to exorcise the curse that he feels has befallen them. Meanwhile the twin sisters (Manon and Capucine) provide light but sometimes macabre relief. The world of IVUL is a world of both fairytale and nightmare with the family manor house and forest landscape providing a compelling backdrop to the story.

Luana feels trapped; she is frustrated with society, her family, and her job at a crèche. She searches for stability and a sense of belonging, and finds both in the local black metal scene. While accompanying her cousin's band on tour as their social media manager, she falls in love with the charismatic singer, Wiktor. When his more radical views come to light, causing tension within the band, Luana refuses to see the truth and cannot let him go.

A food fight breaks out at the airport.

A witty, despairing French-Russian-Italian-Swiss art movie set in 16th-century Georgia, Stalinist Georgia, contemporary Georgia, and contemporary Paris, featuring the same set of actors in all four settings.

Sami, Joe and Leyla are ready for a truly epic summer after finishing school and ready to get out and grab their slice of life. But what is to come is diametrically opposed to their expectations. Determined to stand up for themselves, the three friends find out how right Leyla’s mom was when she told them: always keep more dreams in your soul than reality can destroy.

A romantic comedy centered on two young cooks and a female sommelier working in a famous Zurich luxury restaurant.

Absinthe remains committed to documenting these amazing riders with the most timeless and stylish medium: Film. Following up to last year’s question ‘Optimistic?’, Absinthe answers with a crew of riders who overcome obstacles with spontaneity and skill in another full spectrum snowboard film that is down to have some more fun with snowboarding. Ready.

A woman reads the newspaper with such intensity that she gets literally devoured by it. Painted on its pages she witnesses some of the tragic events of our times, drowns in ocean trash and is threatened by the elements unleashed by climate change. Yet in her despair she transforms this darkness into movement and art, so she plants the seeds of hope.

While on a longer business trip, a wannabe poet urges his beautiful but more simple wife to answer his overly swollen love letters. With no idea how to respond she forwards the letters to a new young school teacher to use his answers instead...

The daughter of a traveling circus director falls in love with a young farmer and finds herself in a life-changing conflict.

Caregiver Hans-Peter Stalder knows the secret code to happiness: a money multiplication strategy that promises hand-picked investors almost unbelievable profits - and a carefree life of luxury. There's just one catch to his story. It's a hoax and only one person stands to benefit: Stalder. For thirteen years, the notorious conman and womanizer fools his naive victims and the authorities.

Two friends drive through the Balkans in two American cars to sell them in Cairo. At times, their friendship is put to the test when a woman they have taken with them tries to exploit them for her own "business" purposes.

Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.

In 1877 a Swiss aristocrat, Alfred von Rodt, became the governor of the remote Chilean island that gave birth to the legend of Robinson Crusoe. Exiled from his country and family, Von Rodt strived to build a utopian “little kingdom” until his death, but failed and lost his entire fortune. The film tells the story of this outcast through the lives of his descendants, who today seek political autonomy and a preservation of their indigenous identity.

Dumped by his girlfriend and finding himself stranded on different couches at friends’ places, Guido tries to transform his drift into an opportunity for a new beginning.

The film is an observation of the migrant experience; from crossing the Mediterranean Sea out of Libya to settling in Paris-based squats. In a view free from prejudice, we quickly see how the experiences of migrants vary in extremes during the different stages in their journey to a better life.

Parvaneh is a young Afghan immigrant who recently arrived at a transit centre for asylum seekers in the Swiss Alps. The only things she has got to know yet are the rural area surrounding the centre and the centre itself.

In 1939, after barely escaping the Nazis, a Gypsy family returns to Switzerland only to be torn apart by racial persecution in the benign guise of children's welfare. This fictionalized story of Jana, an eight-year-old Gypsy girl snatched from her parents and consigned to a life of orphanages and bleak foster homes, is based on a little-known chapter of Swiss history: From 1926 to 1972, the state-supported Pro Juventute, a children's aid foundation, forcibly removed some 700 Gypsy children from their families, in order to sever the ties with their culture and assimilate them to a "better way of life." The underlying aim was to preempt a new generation's caravans from following their nomadic traditions along Switzerland's country lanes.

Even though he's been living with Fouad for three years, Malik is going to marry Halima. Since Fouad doesn't accept this marriage, which would imply a total upheaval of their everyday life, Malik makes him promise not to attend the wedding, which will take place in his parents’ village. As the ceremony approaches, the pressure builds. Will Malik choose to save face in front of his family and the wedding guests or will he choose to save the relationship with the one he loves?

Television makes us sluggish, hypnotizes us, and makes us addicted. Why? How? Is it intentional? From European homes to American laboratories, via the studios of a Japanese channel, the Tube team investigates. Its goal: to discover what the all-powerful television industry is hiding from us on the other side of the screen.

Madrid, 1974. Six years have passed since Martin and his family have returned to Spain from Switzerland. A visit to their adopted country will bring complications.

Switzerland still carries out special flights, where passengers, dressed in diapers and helmets, are chained to their seats for 40 hours at worst. They are accompanied by police officers and immigration officials. The passengers are flown to their native countries, where they haven't set foot in in up to twenty years, and where their lives might be in danger. Children, wives and work are left behind in Switzerland. Near Geneva, in Frambois prison, live 25 illegal immigrants waiting for deportation. They are offered an opportunity to say goodbye to their families and return to their native countries on a regular flight, escorted by plain-clothes police officers. If they refuse this offer, the special flight is arranged fast and unexpectedly. The stories behind the locked cells are truly heartbreaking.

A chance encounter backstage. Broken glass and a shared cigarette bring two strangers together. Three nights in which they learn to overcome social hierarchies and unrequited love. A short film inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella White Nights.

Black dust, shrill metallic noises, dark tunnels, muscular bodies – all that is the past. At the end of 2018, extraction of coal throughout Germany came to an end. That same year, the voices of the emerging climate protest movement Fridays for Future grew louder. Against the backdrop of these media and socio-political events, the film follows five miners on their tragic, humorous and heartwarming search for a new role in life.

In order to win the respect of her friends and family, divorced housewife Sabine decides to perform Wilhelm Tell with a group of Asylum seekers in the Swiss mountains.

Widowed baker Zürrer has to raise his three children, who all turn out to be disappointments to him in various ways.

An apocalyptical storm threatens to wipe out an entire country. A state of emergency is raised while mayhem breaks out.

After her mother's death, Liselotte is taken in by an old sculptor, but some distant cousins, brutal farmers, obtain guardianship of the young girl. Unhappy, she flees and finds refuge with a young shepherd living on alms.

At a remote mountain lake a bound man with cemented shoes is being dragged to the water by two other men and his request for a coup de grace escalates into a clash.

Veronika, a saleswoman at the Tutzinger department store, is in love with Paul, who also works there as a salesman. During a weekend trip in the car, the colleagues grow closer, but Veronika also gets into serious trouble. To cover up a tear in her dress, she borrowed a valuable fur coat from the department store, which she intended to return on Monday. However, the theft is noticed, and Veronika has to justify herself to her boss, Tutzinger. When Paul arrives to defend Veronika, Tutzinger realizes that the two are in love—and makes sure that they can be happy together.

The ascent of Mont Blanc takes two days. First, you have to climb the Aiguille du Goûter, at the summit of which, at 3,817 meters, clings the Goûter refuge, a small metal box where you spend the night. The climb is 1,500 meters long, including some of the most technical sections. 2:00 a.m. The alarm rings, and Carole Dechantre and Jean-Paul Lemercier begin their ascent of the Dôme du Goûter by the light of their headlamps. With the first rays of sunlight, the Arête des Bosses is illuminated. Already, the surrounding mountains seem smaller. One last effort, and they finally reach the summit of Mont Blanc, the roof of the Alps, at 4,810 meters.

A sailor on leave meets a beautiful girl on the ski slopes of Switzerland.

Fifteen-year-old Camille is a vulnerable and a strong-willed seductress- she chooses, she takes, she leaves; she can go very far in her desire for freedom. She is the daughter of disunited parents, Armand, a professor and Colette, an intellectual bourgeois. She manages to seduce Jean-Louis, a professor of letters of thirty-seven years, friend and colleague of her father. She makes him commit a lot of extravagance - he even dyed blond. Later she had a passion for Samuel, a former student of Jean-Louis, lout and trafficker. She is not easy, men learn at their expense, either sentimentally, as with the teacher, or that the first sexual experience come to ignite the relationship with Samuel.

The short film was filmed during the directors' stay at the Eranos Foundation in Ascona-Moscia in the context of the Locarno Residency

A documentary that shows the different fauna that populates natural habitats of France, and the people that aims to protect and preserve them.

The day barely rises when Gregor is snatched from his sleep by the police drumming at his door. They need to use his balcony to access his neighbor's apartment, which no one has heard from for nearly two years. The discovery of the putrefying corpse will haunt Gregor for a whole day, a day that will prove decisive for the rest of his life. When night falls, backtracking will no longer be possible.

Monique finances her medical studies as a go-go dancer in a Munich nightclub. Her relatives, who are involved in local politics, want the club, which they consider immoral, closed down, but during an inspection tour they take a liking to the establishment themselves, taking indecent photos on behalf of the club owner. This leads to an intriguing story full of lies and blackmail, from which everyone involved tries to get out without losing face.

The trial of the case, which has become known under the catchphrase "Murder in Kehrsatz", triggered a great deal of public sympathy and, after the verdict, considerable protest. This came out primarily from a jury member of the process. She, a housewife and SVP member, began to have more and more doubts about a judiciary that apparently no longer works according to the principle "in the case of doubt for the accused". The film tells the story of these jurors during the long trial.

Freddy, a Viennese Jew who emigrated to New York after Hitler's invasion, and Adler, a left-wing intellectual originally from Berlin, return to Austria in 1944 as soldiers in the U.S. Army. Freddy falls in love with the daughter of a Nazi, and Adler attempts to go over to the Communist Zone. But with the advent of the Cold War and continuing anti-semitism, the idealism of both characters is shattered as they find themselves surrounded by cynicism, opportunism, and universal self-deception.

An unusually hot summer. Fourteen year-old Wanda moves with her family from Berlin to Switzerland. Everything will be better here. The move is meant to heal the open wounds of the family. Anna, the mother, has lost her self-confidence due to an affair her husband Joachim had in Berlin. The big house with the overgrown garden and the pretty small town all seems like one big promise. But the new beginning is difficult for everyone. Joachim, 40, throws himself into family activism while Anna, also 40, tries to strengthen the family with new rituals.

Upon suddenly learning of her imminent death, Jacqueline von Kaenel begins to search for the key to her life. Unsparingly, she looks back and discovers how everything is connected; her youth in Franco’s Spain with her mother’s feudal past in eastern Prussia, her desire for music with the one for a dominant and powerful husband. In her ambition to be a perfect mother, she recognizes her fight for identity. But all of a sudden experiences from her childhood in a seemingly happy family crop up turning everything upside down.

Jonathan Vogel (Guillaume Depardieu) would like to turn back the clock and undo the accident that led to his disability and destroyed his life. When he learns that Stivlas Karr (Carlo Brandt), a well-known professor and geneticist, has developed a gene therapy for regenerating the human body, he makes an appointment with him for some clinical tests. But the therapy doesnt go according to Professor Karrs plan and leads to unexpected results. Jonathan, whose life is now in danger, has become aware that there is only one person who can help him: Alice (Alysson Paradis), the professors daughter.

An account of the life and work of Swiss painter, sculptor, architect and designer H. R. Giger (1940-2014), tormented father of creatures as fearsome as they are fascinating, inhabitants of nightmarish biomechanical worlds.

A portrait of Rita, who claims that her mother was never a mother for her. Rita gives birth to her own five children and forces her mother to take the role of a mother.

One winter evening, at an empty gas station, young country musician Sami meets beautiful Julia, who has run out of gas. Sami, who’s been living alone in his car since his ex kicked him out, invites Julia back to “his place” for the night.

Co-director Robert Margolis stars as Robert, an actor who may or may not be himself in this intense and often hilarious film about acting, aging and the dark side of ambition. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, The Definition of Insanity was filmed over the course of 18 months, as a documentary crew follows Robert Margolis obsessively from one failed audition to another, recording in raw detail his every humiliation and small triumph as he searches for that elusive perfect role that will catapult his career into the next level. Just when it seems that he will be forced by family and financial pressures to give up everything he has worked for, he meets legendary filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich («The Last Picture Show», «Papermoon»). That encounter changes his life profoundly, but in a very different way than he had anticipated.

In the new film adaptation of Johanna Spyri's popular children's book, Heidi is sent to live for a short time with her eccentric grandfather, the "Alpöhi", who lives alone above the village and initially wants nothing to do with his granddaughter. Heidi's friend Peter, the baseball-playing son of an engineer from Boston, helps her out and shows her how to write e-mails. A little later, Heidi has to go to her aunt Dete in Berlin. Her grumpy daughter Clara, a lonely city girl, dyes Heidi's hair blue and not only causes the bath to overflow, but also Heidi's patience. Heidi wants to go back to her grandfather. Doris, a girl from a Berlin internet café, and 327.80 marks bring this dream within reach.

The demise of airline Swissair in 2001 was a huge blow to Switzerland's economy and to the country's morale. It was a sad day for Swiss history when the airline's fleet was grounded on 2 October 2001. "Grounding" is set during the last days of the doomed airline, and tells the story of manager Mario A. Corti's unhappy fate, the last, unlucky CEO at the traditional airline company, as well as of all those nameless people who lost almost everything in the maelstrom of Swissair's downfall: their job, home and their belief in Switzerland.

Matteo is a 17-year-old boy who comes to the realization that he is in love with Don Massimo, a young priest of the village that leads the marching band in which Matteo plays the drum. He sees in Massimo a person willing to listen to his fears and desires. For the first time in his life, Matteo feels ready to open up to someone...

The prison in Volterra, Tuscany, is home to a unique artistic practice: It is within these walls that Armando Punzo, shut away for three decades with men serving long sentences, has created his plays.