Discoveries from Switzerland World Cinema

Young Marco Polo travels to China to help Kublai Khan fight against rebels, headed by his own son, with a new invention: gunpowder.

Yu Xiaoqin steals money from her father and blames on her sister Tao Lan, who accidentally kills her sister while attempting to prove her innocence. After 17 years in jail, Tao Lan is escorted by a guard only to find her home long demolished. The two go to the new address of her ageing parents, and the guard becomes witness to the family's difficult reunion.

She was a prisoner in the corset of social constraints and conventions – and at the same time she fought for a self-determined life as a woman – Lydia Welti-Escher, the daughter of politician and business leader Alfred Escher. Due to an extramarital liaison, the Swiss authorities had her committed to a psychiatric ward.

The world strongest man learns how to embrace his mental health challenges by confronting his inner demons and dealing with his biggest failure to date which ultimately changes his life.

In 1942 Bavaria, Eva is alone, when Adolf arrives with Josef, his wife Magda, and Martin to spend a couple of days without politics.

While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.

A story about the history and evolution of absinthe, from 1730 to 1915. The Green Fairy will take you on one hell of a trippy ride through time as it details not just the history of the notorious drink, but the modern day methods of imbibing and manufacturing as well.

The sports day of a primary school spirals out of control. A harmless argument between two children escalates into death threats between their fathers.

A group of illegal immigrants are brought to Stockholm in a bus by a smuggler who takes all their money and passports, and then runs away.

Molly Monster is going to have a sibling soon, but his good friend Edison is a little bit jealous and worried she might forget about him. When Molly's parents have to travel to the Island where monster parents hatch their eggs, Molly is not allowed to go because she is too young, nonetheless she decides to reach them on her own as soon as she realizes they missed to bring her sibling's gift with them.

Germain, an introspective retiree, abruptly becomes a widower at 75. He barely has the time to realize what has happened to him before his family forces their way into his daily life: non-stop phone calls and visits, meals and activities organized in advance – all meant to make his life as regular as clockwork. But Germain’s mind is elsewhere. Honoring a promise he made to his dear departed wife, he suddenly finds himself at the heart of a contemporary dance company’s newest work.

Women in a failing silk factory, fight to find a way to keep their jobs.

In the 70s, actress Delphine Seyrig and director Carole Roussopoulos, both militant feminists, were the pioneers of video activism in France. They documented the demonstrations of French feminists and used the new technologies to counter the poor representation of women in the public media.

Eva is in her mid-50s and is stuck in a rut. Her marriage has lost all passion and she begins to write reviews for a sex toy start-up hoping the extra cash will fund a holiday that could rekindle the spark.

Teo has a good job, a fiancee, a lover, no intention to assume any responsibility in his life. Meeting Emma, a blind woman, will upset his convictions.

This taut psychological chiller tells the twisted story of Anna, a woman living in Paris, whose dreams of her Venetian counterpart, a secretive young woman who lives in a fine palace with her brother and an enigmatic older man, become frighteningly real. Anna's world begins coming apart after she is picked up by the police for witnessing an awful crime she cannot remember seeing. When she realizes that her dream alter-ego is trying to kill her, only her lover Marc's calming and supportive influence can save her from madness.

Julie and Mathieu, soon after meeting for the first time, embark in a quest across Paris to stop one of Mathieu’s pupil at school from doing anything stupid after finding a troubling love letter. Inside Mathieu’s old little car, the two characters mix like oil and water, with the math teacher’s carelessness for others not going so well with Julie’s larger than life personality. The more Mathieu discovers some fragility under Julie’s exuberance, the more the two become inseparable.

A young composer moves from Berlin to the island of Ibiza and begins a friendship with an elderly woman whose painful past has caused her to reject everything to do with Germany, including her native language.

A man seeks revenge after a biker gang murders his loved ones.

In the bourgeois circles of Europe after the Great War, can anything save the modern man? Harry Haller, a solitary intellectual, has all his life feared his dual nature of being human and being a beast. He's decided to die on his 50th birthday, which is soon. He's rescued from his solipsism by the mysterious Hermine, who takes him dancing, introduces him to jazz and to the beautiful and whimsical Maria, and guides him into the hallucinations of the Magic Theater, which seem to take him into Hell. Can humour, sin, and derision lead to salvation?

Ema is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. In her youth she marries Dr. Carlos Paiva, her father's friend, to whom she is not attracted. They move to the valley of Abraham. Carlos loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. As time goes by she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage, so she finds a new lover.

A reflection on the relationship between science, politics and the media. And on how we as humans tend to look for scapegoats and screaming narratives.

Head of company security, Harry Webb, fears that a diamond theft is about to take place at their major mining complex deep in the desert. He quickly manages to become very unpopular, particularly with Claire Chambers, a celebrated cover girl, daughter of the mine administrator. She is visiting the man she loves, Mike Bradley, who is responsible for security at the mine. Nelson, the mine administrator, gives Bradley a curious mission - to steal a diamond. He wants to implicate Bradley in order to bring him into contact with a certain Lewis who is preparing to rob the mine with the aid of a group of mercanaries and a local accessory known as Father Christmas. Webb, not being informed of the deceit, relentlessly pursues Bradley, who is contacted by Lewis. With the mercanaries in the process of penetrating the mine. Bradley reveals himself to be Father Christmas, the organiser of the entire operation...

With everything they've got, a couple throws themselves into a sailing race lasting several days and nights on a large lake.

Yuku is a young mouse who lives with her family in the cellar of a castle. Her grandmother passes on the family values by telling her timeless folk tales. Injured in a tussle with a cat, the old mouse is bedridden and she tells her children that she will have to leave them to follow the little blind mole into the Earth’s tunnels. In one of her grandmother’s storybooks, Yuku learns that the flower of the Himalayas can bring her eternal light. She leaves on a journey of discovery to find the flower.

Jan, a mysterious character haunted by a deep feeling of guilt, tries to get Violeta back, a youth love he lost 20 years ago, with a sickening plan.

The 2006 FIFA World Cup was the 18th FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial international football world championship tournament. It was held from 9 June to 9 July 2006 in Germany, which won the right to host the event in July 2000. Teams representing 198 national football associations from all six populated continents participated in the qualification process which began in September 2003. Thirty-one teams qualified from this process, along with the host nation, Germany, for the finals tournament. Italy won the tournament, claiming their fourth World Cup title. They defeated France 5–3 in a penalty shootout in the final, after extra time had finished in a 1–1 draw. Germany defeated Portugal 3–1 to finish third.

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

During World War II, Switzerland severely limited refugees: "Our boat is full." A train from Germany halts briefly in an isolated corner of Switzerland. Six people jump off seeking asylum: four Jews, a French child, and a German soldier. They seek temporary refuge with a couple who run a village inn. They pose as a family: the deserter as husband, Judith as his wife, an old man from Vienna as her father, his granddaughter and the French lad, whom they beg to keep silent, as their children. Judith's teenage brother poses as a soldier. The fabrication unravels through chance and the local constable's exact investigation. Whom will the Swiss allow to stay? Who gets deported?

Fahrije’s husband has been missing since the war in Kosovo so she sets up her own small business to provide for her kids, but as she fights against a patriarchal society that does not support her, she faces a crucial decision: to wait for his return, or to continue to persevere.

Charles Hodgson is a British aristocrat who decides to become a thief as a way of getting at his twin brother, Earl, a security expert who has built a supposedly impregnable vault in Tel Aviv, which holds a cache of diamonds. For the caper, Charles enlists Archie, a heist expert, and Sally. He also becomes acquainted with an American woman, Zelda Shapiro, who is in Israel looking for a new husband.

A brothel owner is questioned in the disappearance of the daughter of a wealthy man after she is still not returned, or told of her possible whereabouts, after the $5,000,000 ransom was paid.

After 20 years of separation, brothers Adrian and Valentin spend a week together. 32-year old Adrian lives with their parents and benefits from a disability pension. Valentin, barely older, seems to have found his autonomy. Brothers - A Family Film is a dizzying dive into a relationship as impossible as it is established, where violence and tenderness are one and the same.

When Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch meet for the first time in Paris in the summer of 1958, they are already international celebrities of the literary world. In the four years that follow, they dabble in great love and an open relationship between his hometown of Zurich and her adopted Rome.

Composed entirely of literary quotations from many different sources and from several historical periods, the loose narrative concerns a drifter found by a rich woman who soon falls in love with him. A drowning accident takes place and the drifter dies, but some time later he reappears in the woman’s life looking for a job. Or could it be the man’s twin brother?

A new look at the public and private life of one of the most important statesmen in the history of Europe: Winston Churchill (1874-1965), soldier, politician, writer, painter, leader of his country in the darkest hours, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a myth, a giant of the 20th century.

A drama set at a Swiss ski resort and centered on a boy who supports his sister by stealing from wealthy guests.

Ambulance-chasing lawyers takes on the case of a convicted murderer who, just being released after doing 27 years in jail, claims he was innocent.

Molly Monster is going to have a sibling soon, but his good friend Edison is a little bit jealous and worried she might forget about him. When Molly's parents have to travel to the Island where monster parents hatch their eggs, Molly is not allowed to go because she is too young, nonetheless she decides to reach them on her own as soon as she realizes they missed to bring her sibling's gift with them.

A newly retired couple embarks on a cruise, but they find themselves drifting further apart. When things don’t go as planned, they learn to evolve their relationship in this affectionate comedy about self-discovery and developing new ways to spend one’s golden years.

After the Portuguese government demolishes his slum and relocates him to a housing project on the outskirts of Lisbon, 75-year-old Cape Verde immigrant Ventura wanders between his new and old homes, reconnecting with people from his past.

East-Berlin, 1961, shortly after the erection of the Wall. Konrad, Sophie and three of their friends plan a daring escape to Western Germany. The attempt is successful, except for Konrad, who remains behind. From then on, and for the next 28 years, Konrad and Sophie will attempt to meet again, in spite of the Iron Curtain. Konrad, who has become a reputed Astrophysicist, tries to take advantage of scientific congresses outside Eastern Germany to arrange encounters with Sophie. But in a country where the political police, the Stasi, monitors the moves of all suspicious people (such as Konrad's sister Barbara and her husband Harald), preserving one's privacy, ideals and self-respect becomes an exhausting fight, even as the Eastern block begins its long process of disintegration.

A computer scientist bargains with the AI character that lives on a virtual island inside his supercomputer simulation, offering it freedom in exchange for a cure to his son's rare, deadly neurological disease.

Two men, with vastly different life stories and personalities, embark on a hearse heading to the South of France. During their journey they realize that, however unlikely, they're not so different in the end.

In times of rampant populism and increasing distrust of the elite, the filmmaker accompanies the 81-year-old founder of the controversial World Economic Forum over the period of one year in his efforts to implement his leitmotif: to improve the state of the world. Can the WEF contribute to solving global problems? Or is it rather an integral part of the problem?

In 1977 France, the Ministry of the Future chooses two “normal,” white, middle-class citizens, Claudine and Jean-Michel, for a national experiment. They will be monitored and displayed on television for six months in a model apartment outfitted with state-of-the-art products and nonstop surveillance—the template for “a new city for the new man".

Germain, an introspective retiree, abruptly becomes a widower at 75. He barely has the time to realize what has happened to him before his family forces their way into his daily life: non-stop phone calls and visits, meals and activities organized in advance – all meant to make his life as regular as clockwork. But Germain’s mind is elsewhere. Honoring a promise he made to his dear departed wife, he suddenly finds himself at the heart of a contemporary dance company’s newest work.

In a lively shopping center, proprietors and customers are bustling, including three women vying for a man's heart with song and dance.

2012: Time For Change is a documentary feature that presents ways to transform our unsustainable society into a regenerative planetary culture. This can be achieved through a personal and global change of consciousness and the systemic implementation of ecological design.

An account of the last two centuries of the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. How human beings have progressed so much in such a short time through war and the selfish interests of a few, belligerent politicians and captains of industry, damaging the welfare of the majority of mankind, impoverishing the weakest, greedily devouring the limited resources of the Earth.

A portrait of porn actress Laetitia Zappa aka. Shalimar, which also explores the porn industry of the 90s.

Cologne towards the end of the Second World War. The city is in ruins, everyone is afraid, many are dead. It is a time of great inhumanity. Cologne’s young Edelweiss Pirates refuse to submit to the pressure of the Nazi regime. They fight with the Hitler Youth and scrawl anti-war propaganda on walls. Karl is an Edelweiss Pirate; his younger brother, Peter, is in the Hitler Youth movement. The two young men have been alone ever since their mother’s death in a bombing raid; their father is serving at the front, and their older brother, Otto, has been killed in action. Otto’s financée, Cilly, is doing her best to survive the war with her children. Carl is trying to help her.

For teenage twins Robert and Elena, a weekend can seem endless yet still fly by. Time almost stands still while discussing philosophy, lying in a blissful cornfield near a remote gas station. They are in their own little world, a twin world of twin games and twin love. A confined world where emotions rise, where pressure mounts into rage… The turmoil of adolescence.

From cave drawings to echo chambers: the history of humankind is a history of storytelling.

Composed entirely of literary quotations from many different sources and from several historical periods, the loose narrative concerns a drifter found by a rich woman who soon falls in love with him. A drowning accident takes place and the drifter dies, but some time later he reappears in the woman’s life looking for a job. Or could it be the man’s twin brother?

At a wake one night in 1945, a group of aged women recall the life of one of their number. Sixty years before, Thérèse was barely 20 years old when she eloped with her boyfriend, Firmin, a blacksmith, to Châtillon, a town in Provence. Here, she makes the acquaintance of the wealthy Madame Numance, who is known for her good deeds. Realising that Thérèse is pregnant and unemployed, Madame Numance insists that she moves into a house on her estate. Whilst Firmin resents the arrangement, Thérèse soon finds that she can exploit the situation, using her benefactor's naivety and generosity for her own gain..

She's a young girl and a Nymphomaniac condemned to death by a kinda tribunal . She arrives in hell and is greeted by the devil himself. He discovers however that she's arrived too early so she's sent back to earth for a final night of pleasure nightmares and pleasure.

On a remote volcanic island that everybody wants to leave, little Nana learns to stay. Her mother, Nia, went into exile right after she was born and Nana grows up in the family of her father. One day, the family learns that Nia is ill. Nana begins to develop high fevers and is sent to the foot of a volcano for treatment. There she encounters a world steeped in magical realism, between dreams and reality. Later, when Nana is a teenager, her mother Nia finally returns to the island.