Discoveries from Switzerland World Cinema

A documentary with fictional elements, which is based on 140 years of history of the company and the family of the global company Bally based in Switzerland. Images from the daily work in the shoe factory and the Schönenwerd region, reproduced pictures with the men of Bally as actors, historical photographic material, an interview with the manager of today constitute, and others, which combine to form an exciting whole thanks to a clever assembly.

Sophie plans to kill her husband who fell in love with Irma. Sophie envisages everything, but does not know that her plan is already known to her rival.

Faced with the injustices of this world, Margot has lost all hope in the future. Giving up on politics, she decides to entrust her fate to the Dardu, a legendary carp that supposedly predicts the future. But the lake's rules have changed: fishing is now forbidden.

After May 1968, they experimented with communities, squats or free love, with the hope of real change. Today, at retirement age, they live in new places and promote ways of living better and growing old together. What if they were right, these former protesters whose utopias have been muted by triumphant individualism?

In the lush Swiss countryside, single mom Judith is raising her young daughter Milla while running the family fish farm with the help of worker and friend Gabriel. The three live and labor quietly in their peaceful corner of the world. When the unexpected arrival of Gabriel’s brother threatens that tranquility, the specter of impending disaster casts a shadow over their pastoral life. When the devastation comes, it’s chilling. This taut thriller poses provocative questions about the weight of guilt, the complexity of forgiveness, and the price of redemption.

Small dog Poldek lives with a poor old lady in a small one-room apartment. The tenement block is part of a tumbledown grey town out in the nowhere, forgotten by prosperity. The dog is hungry, howles and eats flies that are magically attracted by the old woman. She leaves home every day to seek some eatable stuff. An unsavoury little horrorstory with a lot of action.

A new look at the famous nineteen seventies encounter with a race of beings called the Dargos.

Within this community, still subject to hostile demonstrations, SUPREME highlights gestures of tenderness, desire for love and reconciliation through three characters: endearing, beautiful, extroverted and fragile all at once.

A story of Neda - young girl from Yugoslavia adopted by German parents.

Humans shape, change, and dominate nature. Uniting pleasure and respect remains a utopian dream. A visual study of the ambivalence of human needs.

Eager to leave for the United States, two boys steal a collector's mask. They are caught by a young woman who decides to follow them. But the police are already hot on the heels of this carefree trio as they embark on a joyful escape...

Since the conflict in Darfur spread to the eastern border regions of Chad in 2005, some 13,000 people fled from this region to the refugee camp near the village of Gouroukoun. For them, the war is never far off. Many of these traumatised refugees have lived here for years, with little food, no work and no prospect of returning home. Zuchuat took his camera to the camp and captured their uncertain existence without providing any comment. He captures the refugees' arduous daily life in long shots, often from a single angle. They all have their own stories of how they ended up here, how they saw their families and fellow-villagers perish and no longer have any work, cattle or land. Another striking story is told by a child that uses a drawing to explain how he was chased away from his native village. Little girls sing a battle song while waiting for what comes next in this prison without bars.

Straight out of jail, Sombra returns to his life as a drug dealer in the creole slum of Lisbon. In between the money he has lent and can't get back, the money he owes, a fanciful iguana, an invasive little girl and a ringleader who begins to mistrust him, he starts to think that he might have been better off in the clink...

Daut, a survivor of a massacre where his son was killed, has been rehearsing a letter for 20 years on what he will say if Hague ever calls him to testify for the horrors he has seen that day. The burden of memories gets heavier when he gets the news that his brother died of an illness, making Daut the only last survivor to remember the event. His mind starts to fail him on important details of the testimony. He might never bring justice for his son. For his brother. For his friends. Will the dead forgive him for giving up and being handed over to oblivion?

"The Search for the Meaning" is a collective experience, carried out with the audiovisual contribution of countless people who record their testimonies and spiritual experiences in 19 countries, to show a new spirituality that is being born...

50-year-old Erwin Graf is fired without warning: restructuring makes his job as HR manager redundant. He hides his dismissal from his family, as the Grafs are in the process of realizing their dream of owning their own home. Everyone struggles alone with their fears and insecurities. The film shows what happens when the harsh climate of the New Economy spills over into the family.

Gaël was five years old when his mother, Didy, died. Memories of her have since been lost in the fury of the civil wars, genocide and AIDS that ravaged Burundi and then Rwanda, precipitating her exile to Switzerland. Thirty years on, he ventures to reopen the pages of his family history by meeting those who knew his mother.

Gaël was five years old when his mother, Didy, died. Memories of her have since been lost in the fury of the civil wars, genocide and AIDS that ravaged Burundi and then Rwanda, precipitating her exile to Switzerland. Thirty years on, he ventures to reopen the pages of his family history by meeting those who knew his mother.

The members of the unsuccessful heavy metal band "Mötörcöck and the Mötley Poo" are convinced that they have found a way to become famous. Their evil plan is to shoot a snuff music video in which they are going to kill a young woman for real. During the execution of their sick idea, the musicians realize that they are definitely messing with the wrong "victim"...

Without effort, the shadowy creature sinks its claws into the belly of the defenseless victim. Then it proceeds to rip open the dying man's thigh and begins to drink.... For Garcin, on the run from the world and himself, the stories about the legendary Kori all at once become bloody reality when he comes across the hiding place of the picture-perfect vampiress in a strange place taken over by ruins. But she does not kill him. Instead, a deep friendship develops, which, however, is doomed to failure, because in secret a nameless evil stalks the two...

As the swiss community of Oberwil-Lieli refuses to accept refugees, some political debates become a crucial effort in the whole country.

Markus is a mail clerk in Lausanne. He wants to live in a faster and easier way. Thanks to a chance encounter with an old school mate, he begins to deal with drugs and gets confronted with all the rough edges of the job: death, madness, ghosts.

Leaving for his dream job, a satellite technician keeps solitude at bay by constantly texting with his old friends. After neglecting his duties a satellite leaves its orbit which causes the world's network to collapse.

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.

Buck can slow time to a crawl. How will he use his new power? To impress a girl, of course.

Fritz Reinhart is a successful surgeon in Zurich suddenly faced with the suffering in a refugee camp on the Burmese border during his vacation in Thailand. Being a doctor, he is confronted with the issue of providing immediate emergency aid. He has no idea that this is going to last a whole year and that as a "helper" he will be caught in a turmoil of emotions that challenge his existence as a family man, even his entire life, abruptly and radically.

When a four-year-old girl discovers a dead bird in the garden, her mother is swept into a world where reality unfolds like a cartoon. Inspired by a poem by Nick Flynn, this film is a meditation on a mother's attempt to protect her daughter's sense of wonder.

In 1996, Kalashnikovs were publicly burnt in Timbuktu. At the time, the "Flame of Peace" symbolized the end of the Touareg rebellion, which had been suppressed in bloody massacres. That year, the rebels laid down their arms. That year, with the government having made promises, the families who had fled abroad left Mauritania, Algeria and Burkina Faso to return home. In the fight for rights and survival waged by this people, who for centuries had found their freedom in one of the world's most inhospitable regions, the Sahara, culture and arms have been in direct competition ever since.

" ... Bennani's mother, a real-life pharmacist and pathologist, also plays one here on the CAPS. Her own mother's 80th birthday is the occasion for the titular party, at which she will debut a youthful new look, the product of an extensive rejuvenation procedure ... Shot in the artist's home city of Rabat, Morocco, the 30-minute video channel-surfs between pirate frequencies, surveillance footage, and documentation of the raucous celebration. We spend time with the party’s MC-for-hire as he slurps harira, flips off a trooper, and dispenses a longish musical interlude about a food vendor who once invoked his ire. Eventually, we land on the nightmarish, static-riven eyes and mouth of ZIP, a user interface promising an illicit escape from the CAPS, suggesting we "sign the lease" on a new body in Florida." — Maxwell Paparella (Screen Slate)

Live at Baloise Session, Basel, Switzerland, Oct 22, 2016

For the first time ever, Matteo has cheated on his wife Mara, who is on vacation, and spent a night of wild, steamy sex with Angela, whom he recently met by chance. He awakens with a headache and a satisfied memory of the night. But a message from the wife tells him that she is coming back home because of a hitch and leave him prey to panic. He tries to hide every trace of the adultery but, plagued by guilt-feelings and fear of being caught, enters into a paranoiac spiral, and his clumsy attempts to fix things only manage to create more damage.

Switzerland is presently the only country in the world where suicide assistance is legal. Exit: The Right to Die profiles that nation's EXIT organization, which for over twenty years has provided volunteers who counsel and accompany the terminally-ill and severely handicapped towards a death of their choice.

Xavie, an idealistic filmmaker, takes a motley film crew and two experienced actors in a country house, to shoot a film without a script, following chance, as A. Einstein understood it: "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous".

A rare foray into the art world of Hong Kong since the city’s return to China, exploring the aftermath of an extended lockdown and a failed revolution, under the strictures of a rigorous security law. This documentary delves into the opening of the M+ Museum, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and enriched by the donation of Chinese contemporary art pieces from Swiss collector Uli Sigg. It examines the museum’s and the art scene’s contributions to the debate on Hong Kong’s future, unveiling a new generation of artists and offering an unprecedented perspective on this Asian metropolis in search of its identity.

When a 9-year-old girl discovers that her mother works as a prostitute at night, she tries to escape their morbidly symbiotic relationship in a bold move.

This documentary follows Swiss improvisation musicians and tells their stories.

An animated documentary about sans-papiers in Switzerland and their difficulties in accessing the judicial system.

Klaus Rozsa, a well-known and politically active photographer, lived in Zurich for decades as a stateless individual. All of his applications for naturalisation were refused on political grounds. In 1956 he fled Hungary, growing up in Switzerland with a Jewish father who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. Due to the extreme proximity of such a fate, the camera led him repeatedly to places where injustice was done. It was this particular quality of his camerawork that proved fateful for him.

Two friends playing chess and drinking some good old whisky.

After a parasite has contaminated all of Dakar's drinking water supply, a private pharmaceutical company develops pills to neutralize it. Meanwhile, a poor young man can no longer afford his pills. As the days pass without his treatment, he realizes that he had never been so lucid before.

Bob the plumber is hired to fix a broken pipe and lands to his surprise in a gay fetish club.

In his animated documentary, Henri Marbacher imagines a way of echoing the account of the migratory journey of Agìr, a young Kurd having transited from Syria to Switzerland. Between the voiceover and the animated material, a dialectic is established that reconstitutes memories as a duty of remembrance. – Tom Bidou

The real place where the penguin congress takes place is also the most fictional place on this planet where you can stand on your own two legs. Here, even the animals can talk. This land of dreams and nightmares is called Antarctica. In this desert of ice surrounded by a stormy sea, a few dozen human beings also live. Using sophisticated instruments, they observe the worrying changes affecting our world: the hole in the ozone layer, climate change, and so on.

The story of a young lawyer named Lisa Zürcher who, while defending hemp farmer Michael Krattiger, uncovers illegal agreements and procedural irregularities on the part of the authorities.

Hundreds of thousands of Indian men and women – indigenous inhabitants and landless farmers – demand their right to existence by making a 400 kilometre protest march from Gwalior to Delhi. How can one fight for one’s rights without using violence? With such an important contemporary question, the film spreads far beyond the borders of India. It shows the multiple facets of this imposing protest march and focuses as well on the daily realities of these proud people.

The patriarch and devout father Abdullah has been living in Zurich with his wife Emine and their children for years. Their eldest son Kadir and their daughter Elif are doing well in the Western world. The youngest son, Burak, is gradually becoming radicalized without really realizing it. Abdullah is initially impressed, but then Burak sets off on a "holy war." His father travels to the Turkish-Syrian border region to rescue his son.

Annegret, is a mentally handicapped woman in her mid-thirties who falls in love with Res, an oldish slightly peculiar rocker. Annegret's family however is not happy with the relationship and they want to stop her seeing her lover. Annegreth fights back.

“A gift so precious, you can only offer it once” was the promise Cryosave, a Swiss multinational and global leader in stem cell banking, made to hundreds of thousands of new parents. For a few thousand francs, the company offered to store their newborn’s umbilical cord blood, an insurance policy against more than 80 illnesses, a safeguard for the future. But behind the brochures lay marketing schemes, hidden commissions, and a lack of oversight. In 2019, Cryosave abruptly went bankrupt. Without notifying its clients, the company quietly transferred over 300,000 stem cell samples to a lab in Poland. Since then, many parents have been fighting to recover what they believed was safely stored.

The film begins in 1780 and follows the footsteps of the poet Julius Schönfeld based on his fragmentary diary. The film tells the story of his life at a princely court in Germany in episodic form. One celebration follows another. But the prince's carefree everyday life takes a bitter turn: his cook dies. On her deathbed, however, she asks him to take care of her two children after her death. The prince promises to fulfill her request, probably only because she was his favorite cook. Thus, life changes abruptly for Julius and his sister.

A seemingly idyllic lovers’ encounter reveals itself to be the start of a genderless figure’s surreal odyssey. A dystopian universe unfolds piece by piece as the character learns who they really are.

Bernardo is a police officer from Tessin. Though scared of water, he's forced to investigate a series of disappearances on the edges of the Lake Maggiore, where women have been mysteriously vanishing for generations.