Discoveries from Switzerland World Cinema

An analysis of the current state of democracy in Switzerland

The death of a young patient plunges the renowned neurosurgeon Christian Andersen into a personal crisis that leads him to the darkest and highest corners of the Swiss Alpine mountains, where he is reborn.

A deposed dictator and a persecuted imam find church asylum in the idyllic mountain village of Kalbermatten. At the community meeting, the proud villagers want to show the poor refugees what democracy is. When a dispute over a vote escalated there, the women quickly abolished men's right to vote by majority vote and replaced the mayor with his wife. Out of defiance, the men join the refugees in the church, where the women have nothing to say. While the imam in the church tries to comfort the disempowered men, the deposed dictator helps the deposed mayor to overthrow his beloved wife.

Sweet, 12 year-old Stefanie, played by child model Soraya Da Mota, dreams of attacking her parents with a flail.

On the way through a world of sounds and noise – with Manfred Eicher, the oustanding discoverer and mediator of contemporary music and founder of the music label ECM. On this journey we are meeting musicians and composers, but also people and places which are connected with him and with each other. We are encountering stories, landscapes, cities, disputes and hugs, tranquillity, hectic pace, work, self-doubt, joy, passion.

A staging of Jules Massenet's opera "Manon" stage by Olivier Py. Recorded at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

8mm film by Swiss artist Roman Signer.

Stöffi is almost an adult. However, due to his mental disability, he is still a long way from being independent. He lives with his single mother Antonia in Einsiedeln. Stöffi is a cheerful soul and can bring a smile to the faces of many customers in his mother's small grocery store with his funny sayings and expansive gestures!

Three dancers and three towels lie in neat squares as if on a beach. The placid scene is disrupted by falling black pigment. The floor turns into a canvas and the bodies into brushes.

One day, a tree like any other jumps into a pair of boots and goes off for a walk inviting everyone it meets to follow.

Brief, fragmented memories of Rohmer spoken by Godard, while the screen shows various titles of articles Rohmer wrote for Cahiers du Cinema.

In a country facing the devastating effects of climate change, the Solomon Islands futsal team battles against the odds to reach the FIFA Futsal World Cup, with the goal of securing a future for their sport and their nation.

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.

A young lieutenant must persuade a captive resistance fighter to betray his comrades, or enforce a law which states that for every German soldier killed, one hundred civilians must be executed.

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.

Thule, Greenland, also called Qaanaaqis, one of the northernmost towns in the world. As the climate warms and the ice caps begin to melt, the gentle balance of life for the people of this community is in jeopardy. On the other side of the globe, the melting ice caps are raising sea levels around the Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, threatening to wipe the island right off the map. Though a world apart, these two communities are intricately connected as environmental balance begins to tip and traditional ways of life are threatened. 'ThuleTuvalu' is a stunning documentary addressing the high price of a hundred years of development and how two very different communities are now bound together in facing an uncertain future.

A hospital room. A camera in hand. A motionless man begins to travel – through memories, through longings, through silence.

It's summer and Antonin is on his way to visit the father he has not seen in fifteen years. Accompanied by his friend, a cameraman who will film the reunion, he leaves the city for his childhood home – where fifteen years earlier his father had kicked his mother out of the house.

„Where do I come from? Who am I?“ In a box brimming with countless letters and postcards, Walo Deuber one day finds the only remaining memories of his scarcely known and long forgotten father, Emil. His parents’ marriage fell apart when Walo was still a young boy in the 50s and his father decided to move to South Africa. Sixty years later, Walo decides to trace his father’s footsteps, setting off on an uncertain adventure that leads him from Namibia to Zambia. He uses a first person narrative to create his own account of this hardly known yet increasingly important person. GIRAFFEN MACHEN ES NICHT ANDERS is a film about the glue which, above and beyond genetics, holds humans together.

A young couple living in a rural area are confronted with the end of the world.

A young Dutch girl (my mother, filmed by my father in-love). A little redhead (me, filmed by my father). Boys (my brothers). And through the images of flowers, animals and rallies (super 8s that were found): A chalet (Switzerland), dikes (the Netherlands). And my memories, childhood, teenage years mixed up with the history of women (of my family).

A look at the pervasive power of dust from its tiny particles settling in unseen places to its ability to cause illnesses and create the cosmos.

Premiering the French version in Palermo Grand-opéra in five acts

The defective 16mm footage in Yannick Mosimann's "Nature.Meadow.Sky.Long Shot" gives rise to eerie, abstracted images, while descriptions of those images through voiceover and onscreen text create a potent gap between what we are watching and what we’re being told is there.

It’s not easy being a vampire nowadays, especially if you’ve promised not to drink human blood. Hysterical!

Mateo, a young dancer, returns to his native region of Menton to reconnect with his brother Albert after a long absence. Very quickly, Mateo is confronted with the loneliness of his elder brother who is fighting for the survival of the family candle workshop. Mateo wants to overcome the childhood sufferings, but reconciliation is difficult between misunderstandings and fraternal love.

He is the village chimney sweep, and as a roofer, he loves working on church towers at dizzying heights. For the boy, his grandfather is a lucky charm and a strong man. He wants to emulate him and learn more about his origins. But his grandfather's fall from the roof changes everything.

The salmon want to reproduce. While the salmon men swim upstream in a testosterone-driven race, the women indulge in a fertility dance at the source of the river. But the roles aren't as clearly defined as the men expect.

After he completed his mandatory military service, the filmmaker was held in retention as the revolution unfurled in his country. His military rank was that of a sergeant. During these times, he would go back to his home, located in the middle of Damascus city, take off his military uniform and return to his normal life, working as an assistant director with his friend, the filmmaker Mohammed Malas. To make sense of this schizophrenic situation, he decides to take his camera and start shooting a ‘making-of’ that will eventually go beyond Malas’s film.

A journalist uncovers classified information, believing the truth must be told. But when his trusted ally-a secret hit man is sent to him, their meeting takes an unexpected turn.

It's summertime in rural France. A charismatic stranger happens upon three teenage boys. He has a gun in his car. Are they ready to go for a ride?

Live performance, part of Monteverdi cycle staged by Oper Zürich with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Zürich Opera House Monteverdi Ensemble. Staged and directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle

December 2025: The Young Gods ignite the stage at Fri-Son. More than a concert, this visual experience captures the urgency of the live show while summoning the band's history. An organic celebration of a forty-year career, deeply rooted in Switzerland's most iconic rock venue.

In 2014, in Kurdistan, thousands of Yazidi women are kidnapped by ISIS and reduced to sexual slavery. Most of them become pregnant. Once freed, the surviving mothers are forced by their own community to abandon their children.

Franz Schubert's "Winterreise" is considered the pinnacle of German art song. Hans Zender (1936 - 2019) arranged the cycle in 1993, and his version for tenor and small orchestra brings to light emotions that pulsate beneath the surface in Schubert. Similar to Hans Zender, the choreographer Christian Spuck is also concerned with a journey into the interior of the human being.

They know the woods like the back of their hands. Tirelessly and meticulously, a small group from Basel grazes the forest floor for mushrooms. Whether small, spicy or even poisonous, the more unusual the find, the better. To share their fascination with the rest of the world, they create a piece of nature within the boundaries of civilization.

Erika has cancer and wants to die with dignity. Ruedi, her husband, does not want to live without her, so they decide to depart this world together. Everything is ready: someone is going to help them, but Ruedi suddenly has doubts. A reflection on “assisted suicide”, recounted in a tragicomic vein.

The intimate journey of Caroline, a flamboyant grandmother, and Stéphane, her filmmaker grandson, exploring the development and transmission of gender identity.

In their small village in the Cuban countryside, Leonel (9) and Antuán (13) have been friends for their entire lives. But Antuán will move to Habana at the end of the summer and these holidays might be the last they ever spend together.

A musical documentary and tribute about "choro", an older style of playing that forms the foundation of all Brazilian composition, including samba and bossa nova.

How is our dialect faring in the globalized age? When the "railroad age" began 160 years ago, Switzerland feared that High German would supplant the dialect. The opposite has happened. The dialect persists and continues to blossom.

Between 1950 and 1966, thousands of men set off into the high mountains of the Valais, into a primitive landscape of rock and ice. Here, they erected a temporary civilization. From here, they blasted the rock beneath the Matterhorn and other towering peaks to dig a 160 km-long labyrinth of tunnels to bring water from 35 glaciers to the world's highest dam: Grande Dixence. Miners and intellectuals such as the writer Maurice Chappaz retraced their steps through this endless black abyss in search of the places where the overcrowded barracks once stood, of which only a few ruins remain today. This is where they surpassed themselves.

If you don't take the truth too seriously, you seem to find many things easier. Be it in your professional or private life. Rudolf Langenegger is a politician and husband and a prime example of both genres. The inventive National Councillor on the wrong track is only surpassed by his wife Sylvia. And so it happens that she meets up with her "one afternoon stand" at the same time in the same hotel as her husband with his mistress. As the unfaithful halves of the couple want to enjoy themselves door to door, i.e. suite to suite, it doesn't take long for events to unfold that send everyone involved into the dead end of their excuses at breakneck speed.

A Venezuelan government official is sent to Switzerland to work on a project, strangely descending into sickness as unsettling events unfold back home.

Criminals Rayner and Simon organize a diamond heist, but are outsmarted by Jean and Rémy, two aspiring crooks.

A raw and necessary journey inside the reality of crack cocaine use in Switzerland, a growing phenomenon that - which started on the streets of America's great metropolises - is now taking root in Swiss urban centers as well. The documentary explores the cities of Lugano, Zurich, Lausanne, and Geneva, mapping a silent epidemic advancing among the margins of society. The film gives voice to social workers, street mediators, managers of “consumption rooms” and night shelters: professionals who, every day, face the reality of crack trying to reduce the damage, protect lives, and offer alternatives. Between direct testimonies, urban environments on the edge, and glimpses caught in the night, the documentary shows a hidden Switzerland, vulnerable, but also full of humanity and concrete attempts at change.

At the end of the 70s, punk promised rebellion and self-empowerment, also for women in the scene. They fought for their place on stage among the dominant punk top dogs, battling against social norms and long-outdated female role models. This is their story.

Made from surviving early 1990s 'hi8' videotape of "schwimmen," a teenage industrial/noise band from the (then-Soviet) city of Novosibirsk, and comprising footage shot entirely within and/or from the seventh-floor apartment where they lived and worked communally, "phenomenon" radiates a sense of cinematic immediacy, capturing the lost world of immanence of being and ultimately tapping into vital, uncertain energy of the ephemeral “paranormal” space - both historical and metaphorical - where the only metaphor is optical. The camera pans along frozen squares and zooms into details of the immediate surroundings - innocently reinventing tropes from video-art of the preceding two decades: the unit of “what happens” not an event, but an experience, as it falls oblivion together with the anonymous dreaming collective to which it occurred.