Discoveries from Switzerland World Cinema

Janus has one week to make a choice that will drastically change his life.

Set in the French speaking Swiss town Chatel, this movie follows the story of an orange shark eating the townsfolk and a poor kid who only wanted a friend. The shark was summoned by a cult of soccer fans who leave it offerings like Toblerone bars, clocks, and other found objects.

Claudia's family is brutally slaughtered, and she definitely plans to find the perpetrator or perpetrators - and then take revenge with a bloodbath...

Somewhere in a forest the wind rises.

Explorer and adventurer Mike Horn and Dakar rally winner Cyril Despres join forces to explore the wilderness of Mongolia on their motorcyccles. With Cyril’s two-wheel skills, Mike’s vast knowledge of adventure techniques, the team explored various terrains and unique nature as they travel across Mongolia, learning more about the country’s history and the people who call it their home.

Imani is an underage African teenager living in Lausanne without papers. To pay off the debt incurred by the cost of her journey, she is forced into prostitution. Soon, Imani discovers that her younger sister has joined her.

Annual pageant commemorating the anniversary of the Battle of Morat, the victory in 1476 of the Swiss Confederates over the Duke of Burgundy. The family of Emile Lavanchy watches the event from the left.

Fourth part of a series documenting the Basel carnival.

8mm film by Swiss artist Roman Signer.

A young woman remembers her childhood and her mysterious cousin. Through a child's innocent eyes, we are led into a dark and complex world of adventure, mercenaries, and warfare.

The Making of a Dream is a cinematic essay on stories of dancers. It shows joys and pains from the first steps in an amateur school to the goal to become a principal dancer in a world known ballet company.

An endless, joyful dance between various animated characters.

In the face of the climate emergency, so-called "green" finance is multiplying ethical, sustainable, and ecological investments, often veiling outright deception. A biting investigation into the inner workings of a cynical system.

Starting with the memory of a song hummed in a rainy night, Chronicles of That Time investigates the shifting identity of the Mediterranean; from ‘the shared sea’, unifying the cultural diversity of Africa and Europe, to closed borders.

Marcel and Mila have recently split up. As every year, they're going to stay with Marcel's mother for Christmas in the south of France, where somehow they'll have to tell her the news.

More and more young people are demonstrating iron discipline with targeted muscle building. They often supplement their training with strict diet plans. But the cult of the perfectly defined body also harbors dangers.

The story of a famous singer known throughout the world and a girl eager to make a career in the music industry. Dream or reality?

The history of an Italian seasonal worker in Switzerland in the 1970s, Giuseppe, fighting for his rights as a worker and parent.

Rist's body is the canvas in this surreal montage. Unflinching displays of the artist's own menstrual blood are juxtaposed with images of gemstones, while swooping, close-up shots of Rist's arms and legs are followed by archival footage of lunar fly-bys, suggesting the ease with which visual culture has abstracted the female body into a beautiful but alien natural phenomenon.

Documentary film.

Comprised entirely of archive material, drawing on a rich seam of documents to reveal how Swiss filmmaker and travel writer René Gardi left his mark on how a whole generation viewed Africa from the 1950s onwards. The film doesn’t just highlight Gardi’s colonialist way of thinking, but also functions as a reflection on the projections of Africa of today.

Carmela, don Gregorio, Gabriella and Lorella have never met but they have a lot in common. In the mid 60's, at the peak of the great migratory wave, alone or together with their families, they arrived in Switzerland, where they lived for a more or less lengthy period. Four different stories that speak of hopes, dreams, and solidarity. But they also tell of closure, xenophobia, clandestinity and exploitation.

Pelczyn is a journey back to a childhood home in Poland's former Silesia region, a flowing sequence of images in restless Super-8 shots. Superimposition is a defining feature of the film; images are layered on top of each other and intertwine, creating profundity, sketching inner landscapes and interweaving fragments of memory and recollections.

The 1998 version of Carmen is an opera performance directed by Herbert von Karajan, which was produced in Switzerland. The performance is based on the famous opera by Georges Bizet and was realized by the production company Cosmotel in Switzerland. The actress playing the title role, Carmen, is Mirella Freni, and the production was carried out by the renowned production company Cosmotel.

A bored girl entertains herself by sneaking up on a raven. But the bird turns her game around.

The film follows William, thirty-ish, out of work and looking for a new life after apparently having been thrown out of his previous one. He meets up with Noelle, who seems intrigued by his restlessness - until her economist boyfriend shows up. Yet plot details do little to convey the power of the film, which lay in its capturing the anarchic texture of William's life - a life whose lack of direction was read as a rebuke of the Swiss myth of orderliness and self-satisfaction. With his roots in documentary, Soutter excelled at creating a loose, vibrant cinema, full of quick zooms and dynamic hand-held shots, with dialogue that often alternated between outright quotations and stylized interviews.

He took up the camera as other people take the pencil and paper. In 1968 he presented his first film Lydia at the Solothurner Filmtage. His appearance as a Filmmaker was absolutely unexpected: the only lyric poet of the film, who succeeded virtually without effort in turning his inner life outwards, creating dreamlike images. With a juvenile absoluteness, innocently arrogant, the pale, gaunt man had put the following sentence in the festival paper: "Look, what kind of a film Reto Andrea Savoldelli has created for you with five thousand Swiss Francs." He pitched himself as "First exponent of the Swiss Immigrant's Cinema". (Martin Schaub)

Nearing the end of a long and successful stage career, Miriam Goldschmidt finds her prowess as an actress increasingly on the wane. She struggles to memorize her lines and as her last project with lifelong collaborator, the legendary director Peter Brook, threatens to fall apart, Miriam looks back. Referencing Brook’s ground-breaking book «The Empty Space», she uses an empty rehearsal room in Berlin to invoke her archetypal life journey that took an orphaned black child from post-war Germany to the world’s biggest stages. We «Call Her Miriam» is a bewitching and moving portrait of a great artist living between dream and reality, truth and fction and life and death.

The film deals with an imigrant woman from southern Italy, who lives in Frankfurt in the 1970s. Unusual about this film is the way of the storytelling. The original plan was to make a documentary, but none of the female protagonists were willing to be seen in front of the camera. The fear to expose their own family was too big. The law of “omerta” exists in the diaspora as well. A southern italian proverb states: “The girls greatest value is her beauty - the womans greatest value is her silence”. For this reason, in the film only the sound of Maria M. from Basilicata, can be heard. She remains anonemous. In the movie, southern italian emigrants act in Maria's story. In fact, they end up playing themselves, which gives the film several layers and adds a refreshing sense of humor.

Little Sina is a completely normal child. She laughs, draws, loves to dream and loves to express all her thoughts in pictures. But in her bright and colorful fantasy world, there is no room for the structured alphabetical world of adults. Sina refuses to learn written language at school. After a sobering conversation with the teacher and school management, Sina's mother tries to persuade the child to write at home with increasing pressure. The little girl blocks every attempt. The conflict escalates and the mother is successful. But not without consequences.

Antoine is at the wheel of a car with an unconscious boy beside him. Throughout the night, he has to contend with the storm threatening the mountain top.

A painter in his studio, looking back on the strange times of a childhood spent with a blind sister.

Playful and incisive, Casting di un padre highlights the shooting process; and more specifically, the search for an actor who can embody the director’s recently deceased father. In this way, Giulia Goy generates scenes that allow her not only to establish new dialogues with her father, but also to begin the grieving process.

A travelogue about India. But it is more than a video about a foreign place. We follow the director's itinerary and witness his chance encounters with people and also public events, some of which continue to shape India's politics today.

A human comes into possession of a strange artifact that allows them to accelerate into an advanced stage of human evolution. Their transformation is initially terrifying, but eventually accepted. The old body dies and a new state of being emerges.

As snow falls over a city, people share secret tricks with each other. Like how to kiss somebody and make them disappear, or having thoughts which are unrecognizable to machines.

Fragment of last reel from "History Lessons" presented in an installation as a special event for the Venice Biennale Arte.

A ferry drifts along the Weser. Slow 16mm images of boats, railings, industrial shores, and cranes—scarred and clouded by the river itself, hand-processed with its water, marked by sediment and rust—dissolve into Annina Mossoni’s text: some people want the world on a string.

Six-year-old Diego exceeds his screen time and ends up with square eyes. This triggers a series of mysterious phenomena, seeping through various screens in the apartment building. When police officers Kim and Mike arrive to investigate a noise complaint, they find themselves in a chaotic mix of realities and must face off against fictional threats come to life.

From her grandmother’s garden to California via the Mojave Desert and the cosmos, Emmanuelle Antille takes us on a journey to out-of-the-ordinary places, as we meet the people who created, imagined or discovered them. The Wonder Way is a free and personal quest, an inner exploration and a journey in search of unusual—but very real—spaces.

A personal notebook of a time spent at science labs in Zürich. A mind map gone wrong of unfinished ideas on thought disorders, medical imaging, cells, and aging.

A car aficionado, filmmaker Paulo Carneiro travels 2000 kilometres to meet car enthusiasts of the Portuguese community in exile. In a pop and urban universe, Périphérique Nord explores this shared passion and the freedom it provides for these exiled persons who seem to finally find (once again) a territory of their own.

Three extraordinary people tell their unusual life stories and tell why animal welfare starts at home, the inner life counts and nothing should be thrown away. A nature-loving film that couldn't be more multifaceted.

A chronological selection from choreographies by Jérôme Bel exploring the political aspects of his dance.

An observational documentary that focuses on the Tentative Association, which helps young people with autism develop independence and socialization skills. Seven autistic people live in a big house and, together with their helpers, they fill their days with household tasks.

A hybrid film set in London by a Rwandan director, exploring a three­way relationship between a mysterious Nigerian man, a British woman and her ex. After his death, Simon appears to the ex as a ghost to tell his story, demanding a presence that was denied him as an asylum seeker. British and European political furor threaten both the director’s film plans and his stay in the UK. The fictional scenes are intercut with scenes of demonstrations.

A random seventies newsreel from the artists’ hometown in Soviet Siberia forms the substratum for a relentless exploration of representational and narrative strategies: without ever collapsing into a ‘story’ or abstraction, the film recants the relationship between analogue and digital, surface and reference, sense and experience, past and present. –Thomas Zummer

A finely-woven tapestry, unifying things that are incommensurate. What is it about? Something that we all know, but which resonates differently with each of us, that cannot be put into words. You could call it our inner hum.

The wild Seventies. A quest for higher consciousness, spirituality and sexual freedom. In England, young Hugh Milne hears the voice of spiritual teacher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on an audiotape and travels to India in search of his own self. Sheela Patel, a young Indian woman, is brought to the charismatic guru by her father. At 21, she knows: all she wants is to be with this man. In his Ashram in Poona, Bhagwan urges his disciples to meditate and practise tantric sex in order to reach a higher plane of consciousness. Hugh watches the guru's ascent as his bodyguard. Sheela becomes his secretary and the powerful boss of Bhagwan's model community born in the mountains of Oregon...