Discoveries from Switzerland World Cinema

A film about courage and how young people deal with their emotions and solve their conflicts.

A film dedicated to the dramatic events that occur on the roads due to alcohol.

Guess Who's Back, a hacker known for his online hoaxes, has caused the real death of a man. Nobody knows since when the hacker operates, but everyone can meet him through his avatar at the Club des Crocos in the video game Life On Earth. A clash of real and virtual worlds in a universe of pixels, invented from scratch, funny and disturbing.

Florence and Etienne visit Florence's dead father's house. He has hung himself from a tree. Etienne will soon discover that the couple's excursion brings up the challenge to open up to each other about unspoken truths.

Expressionistic devices depict the nervous breakdown of a young physician whose patient has died,on whom he had tried out a new serum contrary to his superior's orders.

Tarasp Castle in the Lower Engadine sits enthroned on a rock and is visible from afar. The castle was managed by the director's family for three generations; she grew up there. Using documentary and animated film elements, she tells the eventful story of the centuries-old castle.

In this small village in Extremadura, population has been declining since the 1960s, driven away by unemployment. Alberto Martín Menacho returns to this region he knows intimately, and together with local youths, spins stories in a reality suspended between tradition and modernity, human and animal, between a thousand-year-old oak tree and Tinder. A strikingly graceful debut film.

Martin's life is getting out of hand.

Robert, a former driver in illegal races, returns to his hometown Dietikon after a long period of absence. He is determined to put his past behind him and starts an apprenticeship in a repair shop. When he meets teacher Alice, his life starts to unravel.

A waltz played with an accordion starts a short story about the running time.

An Italian descendent inherited 5000 hectares of virgin forest in Chaco Paraguaio. He tries to stop deforestation to intensive farming and livestock, while advocating for native Guaraní Nandevas.

For Alyssia and Ilaria, every farewell is also a reunion. Just a while ago they were at the Italian Mediterranean coast, now here they are standing at a parking lot in front of an Esso gas station, waiting for their father’s car to appear around the corner. Affectionately, they bid their mother good-bye for now. The two sisters’ parents are separated. Just like Carleton, Sherazade and Thomas, the two girls have found their own way of dealing with the situation.

A set-up for an experiment in an empty room. Former inmates reconstruct an Israeli secret service interrogation centre. These Palestinian men use role play to come to terms with their memories and the humiliation they have experienced.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I August 1914, Eastern Front. The Russian surprise attack on the northeasternmost part of the country causes serious problems for the German defenders.

In the depths of a snowy forest in an unknown wartime, two soldiers from opposing armies try to outwit each other in a perilous game of cat and mouse - until they find themselves outplayed by destiny.

They have a job that suits them, enjoy their colleagues and take time to enjoy the simple things around them. They wake up every morning next to their loved one. Yet they no longer enjoy anything, constantly being pushed around by a society that demands more and more of them, and burdened by problems that are beyond them.

Sören and Melchior got lost in the woods. While Sören desperately looks for a way out, Melchior enjoys the fresh air and the drive into the blue. At a lonely gas station, the two get into a heated argument and Melchior takes off. Left on his own, Sören drives through the increasingly surreal forest which becomes denser and denser and finally invades his mind. Through the overwhelming trip, Sören finds back to his inner self.

A city in explosive development. Overcrowded streets of human beings, all on motorbikes, get mixed up into circulation streams, nobody knows neither their source nor their activities.A magma of images reflects, without consistency, all ideals of consumption.In this confusion, a particular destiny could be a daily life of everybody. Such as a common story: a grand-mother is dying, a divorced woman who does not want to take care of her teenager child, an anxious father initiates his son earning his own living, a teenager dreams of a lucky life without having to work, and new rules of transparency in global way of judgments implicate up to private life of a human being, pretending control the quality of his work... Nobody knows what will be happened next?

Before we run out of gasoline, we will no longer have phosphorus for industrial agriculture. No fertilizer, no harvest! And in 300 years, humanity will be history...

Fredy the dog is suffering from the separation of his owners. Can the traumatized divorce dog find his "inner dog" again with the help of an animal psychologist? – What a great idea!

90 years of Emil Steinberger - a film about courage, love and the tireless urge to constantly reinvent oneself.

A highly secure conference centre, nestled in the mountains. Hugo Radi combines a creative way of filming this locus of power with two fictional voice-over accounts to construct a dystopian world with real contours. This speculative film seems to draw inspiration from the most frightening elements of our contemporary societies.

Abdou, a young runaway, stops at a service station on the motorway Paris-Marseille where he meets Georges, the attendant. Georges decides to quit his job and take the boy to Marseille to watch the World Cup. Their heads stuffed with dreams, their pockets empty, the two grow closer as they travel along, meeting some amazing people on the way.

Documentary on Christian Schocher, director of the legendary «Reisender Krieger» (1980).

Under the Carribean is the name of a film that was filmed between August 1953 and April 1954 during Hans Hass's exhibition to the Galapagos on his research ship Xarifa. The expedition members' work on board and under the water, as well as their new discoveries, make up the material for this documentary, which is embedded in a fictional plot. Lotte Hass, an underwater model, is one of the main actors.

Nick Brandestini is a filmmaker based in Zurich, Switzerland. His first documentary, Return to Florence (2006), about a small group of young American and British artists studying classical methods at an unconventional school in Florence, screened at numerous film festivals across North America, winning several awards. His next documentary, H.R. Giger's Sanctuary (2007), about the renowned and reclusive artist, H.R. Giger, most famous as the creator of Ridley Scott's “Alien”, was an official selection at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles.

On the last voyage of the Italian ocean liner EUGENIO C. from Genoa to Rio de Janeiro, Zurich-based ethnologist Roger Wiedmer meets Brazilian Zaira Gelbert. He wants to repeat the journey to the Indians of the Amazon described by Claude Lévy-Strauss in "Tristes Tropiques" some forty years later and begins with the first chapter: "La fin des voyages." Zaira Gelbert returns to her roots in her homeland after a two-year stay in Europe. The love story between the two—which lasts the eleven days of the crossing—becomes a dialogue between two cultures. The encounter with Zaira opens Roger's eyes. Now he perceives the sea, the ship, and above all the passengers with their stories. He meets emigrants, poets, first-class passengers, tourists, crew members, priests. A stowaway is also traveling with them.

The slow construction of an image, to the rhythm of steps, ends when the monster meets his Bride.

Apocalypse series such as "Fear the Walking Dead" have shown us all too distressingly that, in the face of the apocalypse, stockpiling may secure your own supplies in the short term, but in no way offers protection against the actual threat. And an end-time classic like “Contagion“ already preached ten years ago that hand hygiene and face masks are essential if a global pandemic is to be contained. In "Fiction for Future", we ask old masters of the genre such as Roland Emmerich, Terry Gilliam and Frank Schätzing what the nightmarish tales of doom tell us about the horrors of our future. How will global challenges such as climate change and pandemics change our lives? Can we master the major challenges of our future? And if so, how?

Robbie Williams presents his new album “Heavy Entertainment Show” during a showcase at the Swiss German radio SRF studios in Zurich on November 15, 2016.

A poor, rural Cambodian family slowly disintegrates during the cycle of a single rice crop.

Elija is afraid of growing old and the responsibilities that come with it, but now he has to face his fear and accept reality.

AGNI, a visual artist in the twilight of his life, is rushing to complete his monumental work. Caught up in a frantic creative routine despite his declining health, he transforms every gesture, every moment into a final trace of his passage. Soon, he knows, he will join the stars.

In August 2020, the well-known Swiss polar researcher Konrad Steffen died on the Greenland ice. It is suspected that he fell into a crevasse covered in fresh snow while on a routine trip to a measuring station. To this day, there is no trace of him.

The seemingly idyllic region of Ravnice, at the north-western tip of Bosnia and on the EU's external border with Croatia, hides a dangerous past with uncleared war mines. Migrants seeking a better life, are often pushed back across the border from the EU into the surrounding woods, finding themselves lost in the village. Local villagers open the old school building to offer them unofficial, temporary shelter and safety. Despite this ongoing crisis, everyday life continues in Ravnice, marked by daily routines.

It has been 35 years since Maria left her newborn in a baby window. With the help of the authorities, she tracks down her daughter and meets Caroline for the first time. A DNA test is to prove their kinship. An increasingly close relationship develops between Maria and Caroline. However, unfulfilled expectations and quiet accusations threaten to break it time and again. The two women struggle together – until the result of the DNA test is available.

1991, Riga Latvia. Lena, a child of divorced parents, escapes from home in the middle of the night when she is fed up with her fathers drinking habits. That's when her journey back home begins.

Milan, like Paris or Stuttgart, and like many other European cities, is the theater of the drama of immigration. Demba reconstructs his story and that of his brother Yaro, both Senegalese immigrants in Italy, in a long and fragmentary flashback that begins with Yaro’s murder and recounts their departure from the village, arrival in Europe, the work they find selling lighters and picking tomatoes in the south of Italy: the stages every “non-EEC citizen” goes through in Italy.

Herdsman Fabiano will be a father soon. He owns fifty goats and eight cows and is trying his best to produce the alpine cheese that his hippie parents made a name for themselves with in the '70s, in an isolated valley of Ticino. But nothing is going the way it should. He's in debt, and feels guilty for a fatal accident which occurred the previous year, which haunts him. How can he and his girlfriend build a life together under such difficult circumstances?

The film tells several interconnected stories of Swiss people who fall in love with foreigners but struggle to maintain their relationships due to prejudice and social norms. The narrative culminates in a conciliatory scene in which the characters overcome their differences and recognize the importance of love across national borders.

A promising Italian cartoonist lands in Buenos Aires in 1950, with the dream of reaching the United States, to discover that, for him, America will be Argentina. The country immediately overwhelms him with its massive economic boom and a cultural scene among the most vibrant in the world. We are at the dawn of Argentina's most delirious decade, and the young immigrant feels that the vast promise of this country is within his grasp. His name will indeed make itself known: Hugo Pratt.

Notes on the movie Passion

Movie about prisoners in prison "Thorberg"

Spira comes home from a juvenile detention center and reconnects with his loved ones in Reboleira (Lisbon), a slum on the verge of being destroyed. Kikas makes it clear that he’s not welcome.

As winter sets in and P.A. sees the world shifting around him, he starts to observe strange phenomena in the environment. The changes are imperceptible at first, but gradually his whole world seems to be on the brink.

In a loveless relationship, Zoé ditches her faceless boyfriend in a cheap motel room and sets off north without a penny to her name. She hitch-hikes, pilfers a meal from a gas station, encounters strangers who could be her next ride or a passing glimpse, ambling toward some unknown destination. At the end of her pilgrimage, Zoé reaches the English Channel; on the ferry a woman mysteriously disappears. A new coat gives Zoé a new identity, but even in a new country she's not quite sure she's escaped herself.

Christian demonstrates some techniques and preparations and meditates on the turntable, improvisation, and the difference between the sonic and the visual arts.

At once a portrait of techno producer Carl Craig and a love letter to his city of Detroit, Desire: The Carl Craig Story lays out the vast backdrop of artists and venues who played a part in the rise of Craig’s massive, genre-defying career.

A young couple breaks into a Lost Place flat, to make out with each other. While they are making jokes about her ex-boyfriend, a golden-nose killer is following them and later coming after their lives. Will he reach his own goals?

Every night nameless bodies land in Dr. Cristina Cattaneo’s autopsy room. She calls them the Pure Unknown. These Pure Unknown often belong to the fringes of society. They are homeless, sex workers, runaway teenagers. Lately, they have mostly been migrants, rejected by the Mediterranean Sea onto the shores of Italy. If all rights belong to the living, nothing is left to the dead. So what happens when the dead have lost their identity? In the face of this growing multitude, no one seems concerned about their right to dignity.No one but Cristina.

The Life from Hells Angels Switzerland Founder Martin "Tino" Schippert

The filmmaker Lenz has left his native Berlin for the Vosges to research the story behind Georg Büchner's novel fragment Lenz. But he soon trades the Alsatian landscape for higher altitudes and more emotional territory: a reunion with his estranged wife Natalie and their son Noah in the Swiss Alps. Like his literary counterpart, the modern-day Lenz follows the Romantic motto: Genius writes its own rules. Against a background of kitsch global tourism - provided by the authentic Zermatt locations - Thomas Imbach's Lenz portrays an unconventional family and a man struggling between euphoria and desperation.

Mira returns home to Dushanbe from Russia to visit her father, a wastrel who is completely addicted to a game called "odds and evens," or Kosh ba Kosh. When another player comes to collect on gambling debts and finds nothing of value, he sets his sights on Mira.

The unprecedented trial of strength between a group of elderly citizens and the Swiss government, which ultimately ended in favor of the plaintiffs before the European Court of Human Rights.

A curious lynx leaves its forest, attracted by the lights of the nearby town. It has great fun there until it falls asleep in the middle of a parking lot. In the early morning, locals are astonished to find this strange animal covered in snow.

Two young brothers move into a new house with their parents. Very quickly, the younger one notices that something is not right in this seemingly ordinary daily life.

Fredi M. Murer wrote and directed this Swiss drama about a family with a missing child. The only explanation seems to be kidnapping, but no ransom note arrives. Police inspector Anatol Wasser (Hanspeter Muller) soon faces an elaborate mystery: a dozen Swiss children vanish with no indication of any pattern -- other than the fact that they all lived near lakes. Is organized crime responsible, or does the answer lie in mystical realms? Shown at the 1998 Montreal Film Festival.