"Es Hundeläbe" (1972) is a short, funny animated film with literally visualized idioms from the Swiss vernacular. "Emil Eberli" (1973), also made in the photography class at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, was a well-known city original who collected booze in restaurants with his handcart. Friedrich Kappeler portrays the outsider, whom everyone laughs at, with great respect. In "Müde kehrt ein Wanderer zurück" (1975), he describes how a desperate old man in the neighborhood is sent to a retirement home. Friedrich Kappeler's early works show what would also characterize his later films: a great empathy for protagonists who touch your heart and remain there, unforgettable.

The image of the ever-laughing clown from Ascona is well known. He is recognised as a national figure. Performing on tours throughout the world has made him renowned. This film by Friedrich Kappeler is a portrait of a clown and a man still with full of ideas and action with almost 70 years.

Director Kappeler returns to the subject of his past film "Die Ballade des Schreiben" (1995), about poet Gerhard Meier. Now that documentary is viewed as an essential introduction into the poet’s work, a man who became a writer after 33 years working in a factory. Two years after the film Gehard Meier’s wife Dorli died, and in 2005 the now 88-year-old Meier published "Ob die Granatbäume blühen", possibly his most moving work so far. Kappeler’s new documentary expands the themes in his previous one with "Das Wolkenschattenboot". In beautiful, dense images, we experience a talented writer, a person who is true to himself and who conveys his calm and clear view of the world to us in wonderful, powerful language.

Born in 1900, Varlin decided he had had enough of Switzerland at about the age of 20 and left for Berlin where he became a painter. He then moved to Paris, remaining there a dozen or so years despite the difficulty of earning enough money to keep body and soul together. When the owner of the gallery in which he usually exhibited his work died, Varlin returned to Zurich. But even in Switzerland he did not feel particularly welcome or at home in any way. The war over, his paintings seemed very much out of place in the cosy, unruffled world of post-war Switzerland. Varlin began to travel extensively, while continuing to paint. Eventually he decided to settle at Bergell in canton Grisons, where a significant portion of his work of later years, in terms of both quality and quantity, was completed. He died in 1977. Friedrich Kappeler gives voice to the Swiss painter Varlin, in encounters with his acquaintances and relatives, in his paintings and writings. In addition to well-known works such as "Die Heilsarmee" and portraits of Hulda Zumsteg, Max Frisch, Hugo Loetscher and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, we discover a man full of contradictions. A courageous and sharp-thinking artist on the one hand, an insecure and vulnerable emotional man on the other - a painter who used brush and paint to capture the splendor of everyday objects, but also the fragility of human existence.

Thurgau painter Adolf Dietrich's paintings have found their way out into the world - as far as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But Dietrich himself stayed in his village all his life and painted what he loved and what preoccupied him: Neighborhood children, bouquets of flowers, pets, the view from his parlor window into the neighbor's garden, onto the village street and the view from his garden onto Lake Constance. In this documentary, Friedrich Kappeler meets people who still knew the Berlinger painter: his nephew, various models, an employer and collectors. Most of them were already very old in 1991, but when they talk about Dietrich, they light up and laugh. Kappeler has clearly found a connection with the contemporary witnesses and takes us on an entertaining journey through the landscape of Untersee and the wonderfully photographed paintings. A journey on which we learn a lot about the painter, but also about the living conditions of the time.

This is no ordinary documentary about the forest. Although there are foresters and charcoal burners and lots of greenery in the images, there is also a thought-provoking text by Robert Walser and a witty Schubert opera with Mathias Gnädinger as a hunter lying in wait for a pair of lovers. The result is a peculiar homage to the Swiss forest, to the quiet places where people tend to retreat, turning to their dreams, sufferings, joys, work or hobbies. An essay about the forest by Friedrich Kappeler, based on personal experience.

Three old photographers in the mid-1980s - from the patron of a family business spanning several generations to a city original documenting Zurich's nightlife with his Polaroid camera - shortly before the advent of digital photography. Friedrich Kappeler and his cameraman Pio Corradi, both trained photographers, portray their professional colleagues with great empathy, poetry and humor.

A father, a photographer by profession, would like to involve his son in the family business, but he hesitates and doesn't know what to do with himself. His homeland has become alien to him. In 1980, Swiss television commissioned seven filmmakers to make hour-long feature films about the seven deadly sins. Friedrich Kappeler's contribution is strongly influenced by his own experiences at the time. His protagonist returns from Germany to his home town (filmed in Diessenhofen and Frauenfeld) - just as he himself had returned from film school in Munich shortly before. Gardi Hutter, Elsbeth Gmür and Astrid Keller play alongside Yves Jansen and Walter Wefel.

"Der andere Anfang" is the story of Theo who does not want to live the life that is expected of him. But it is also about the difficulties of imagining and realizing a life that contradicts what is already valid and normal. When designing the film, Friedrich Kappeler sought the opportunity to leave out what contributes nothing else to the narrative: in other words, language that is visualized verbatim and sounds that only provide background. "Der andere Anfang" is also what you always hope for, and what rarely happens when you only hope.

Struggling with his profession as a teacher, Ugyen is sent to Lunana in northern Bhutan for his final year of training. With a warm welcome, the local children try to win him over but they do not have much time...

The origins of the Colombian drug trade, through the epic story of an indigenous Wayúu family that becomes involved in the booming business of selling marijuana to American youth in the 1970s. When greed, passion and honour collide, a fratricidal war breaks out that will put their lives, their culture and their ancestral traditions at stake. «A film of both gangsters and spirits. A family film, an ensemble story of strong, intuitive, resilient and powerful women, who wait at home for unconscious, impulsive, fearful men, as they talk, they negotiate, they run around. Intuition vs reason, innocence vs vengeance, word vs honour. All in telling the great tragedy that would curse us forever. The great taboo that we are not allowed to discuss. Told, for once, in an intimate, personal way. Our own way. That soft breeze that seemed to come to refresh, and became the ravaging storm that showed us the true face of capitalism, its purest form. Our Jayeechi, our birdsong.» Cristina Gallego/Ciro Guerra

Coming of age in Barrow, Alaska - the northernmost community of the United States - has become a little more complicated for the local youth than it was for their ancestors who originally named this place “Ukpiagvik” (“where we hunt snowy owls”). They are the twenty-first century descendants of a culture that has endured for millennia on this isolated, but rapidly changing tundra. The harvest of the agvik (bowhead whale) remains the heart of their culture. "Children of the Arctic" is a year-in-the-life portrait of Native Alaskan teenagers navigating between both being modern American teenagers and the inheritors of an endangered culture.

The mountain massif of Cutucú in the south of the Amazon region in Ecuador was a kind of defense against the environmental destruction for the native population but in the same time an obstacle. The people had no access to the modern world outside. The road through the Cutucú now allows mobility in order to exploit the fossil resurces but it grants the natives a way to reach the so called civilized world. The process happens in an unspectacular way. Where progress starts it cannot be stopped anymore: Escavating, digging, shovelling, grubbing, selling and buying: everyday madness. Excerpts from the film «Shuar, People of the Sacred Waterfalls» (1986) recall us, how in the traditional culture of the Shuar nature was an integrated part of life and mobility was achieved in the hallucinogenic ecstasy with no bounds. Today the natives are transporting wooden boards with horses to civilization. Wood is the fastest business, other products must first be created. Now the jungle disappears in everyday madness.

25-year-old Sibel lives with her father and sister in a secluded village in the mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea region. Sibel is a mute, but she communicates by using the ancestral whistled language of the area. Rejected by her fellow villagers, she relentlessly hunts down a wolf that is said to be prowling in the neighbouring forest, sparking off fears and fantasies among the village women. There she crosses path with a fugitive. Injured, threatening and vulnerable, he is the first one to take a fresh look at her.

There’s a horse thief at large on the outskirts of Bishkek high up in the mountainous region of Kyrgyzstan’s capital. Otherwise not a lot happens in this small community that does at least boast a cinema. This is where stories of the war in Afghanistan, Bollywood fairy-tales from India or films by ex-Soviet director Tolomush Okeyev open up a window on the world. This is also where projectionist and horse thief Centaur lives with his deaf wife and young son. Theirs is a simple life and yet one that increasingly seems to fall foul of the jealously and intrigues of others. Centaur believes that the people of Kyrgyzstan themselves descend from centaurs, mythological half-human half-horse creatures, and that horses are, as he says, the wings of humankind’. Unfolding in contemplative images, Kyrgyz director Aktan Arym Kubat’s film is an allegorical tale of humans, animals and nature trying to live together whilst caught between faith and superstition, modernity and tradition. As in his award-winning film The Light Thief Aktan Arym Kubat himself once again plays the leading role.

Pierre, a Parisian engineer, goes up in the Alps for his work. Irresistibly attracted by what surrounds him, he camps out alone high in the mountains and leaves behind his everyday life. Up there he meets Léa, a chef of an alpine restaurant, while mysterious glows glitter in the deep mountains… Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the French Alps, director and lead Thomas Salvador tells the story of a dropout who discovers the mystique of nature. An adventure film that is as unusual as it is humorous.

Nanook and Sedna are the last members of their ethnic group and live in a yurt on the snow-covered fields in the far north. Spring arrives earlier than usual, ice fishing is less productive than it used to be and airplanes make their way in the sky. Sedna also notices that Nanook is beginning to forget things. In beautiful pictures Milko Lazarov tells this calm story in gentle reference to the great pioneer of the documentary film Robert J. Flaherty with his Nanook of the North.

At a time when audiences are filling up the cinemas to see the feature adaptation of Bruno Manser's Life in the Jungle, Christof Kühn's successful documentary BRUNO MANSER - LAKI PENAN from 2007, now digitialized for online streaming, is the perfect choice. With original film and sound recordings by Manser and interviews with his companions in the Borneo jungle, this documentary provides an authentic insight into the adventurous life of the Swiss environmental activist.

1922: For the first time, the lonely weather station on the Säntis summit is occupied by a married couple. The unemployed Joseph Manser marries the pregnant Lena overnight and thus gets the post. But the weather warden couple have an adversary who feels cheated out of the job - he wants to take command on the mountain and climbs after the two. A showdown ensues at the weather station. - The film is based on true events.

Amongst the pythonic mountains of landlocked Lesotho, an 80 year old widow winds up her earthly affairs, makes arrangements for her burial and prepares to die. But when her village is threatened with forced resettlement due to the construction of a reservoir, she finds a new will to live and ignites a collective spirit of defiance within her community. In the final dramatic moments of her life, Mantoa’s legend is forged and made eternal.

In a traditional tribal society in the South Pacific, a young girl, Wawa, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an intertribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal. The young lovers run away, refusing her arranged fate. They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.

On the Tibetan grasslands, Darje and Drolkar live a serene and ordinary life with their three sons and the grandfather. A condom sparks a series of embarrassment and dilemma, breaking the harmony of the family. What matters more in the circle of life and death, soul or reality?

After the death of his beloved wife, retiree Tom decides to set out on a long journey. Carrying the ashes of the deceased in a small suitcase, he sets off from the northernmost point of Scotland to Land’s End in the south of England – the place where they first met. Tom makes the entire journey on public busses where he meets so many different people who share his story that he soon becomes a national celebrity. The road movie THE LAST BUS tells the heart-warming story of an ambitious man who embarks on a nostalgic journey, yet experiences many new and enriching encounters along the way. The perfect stage for legendary British character actor Timothy Spall.

Bratsch, located in the Leuk mountains, is an Upper Valais village with a magnificent view of the Rhone Valley. Just one hundred people still lived in the village in 2015. Since the municipality merger with Gampel down in the valley, the school building has stood empty. Something was about to change. The film documents the development and changes in the village from the reopening of the school in autumn 2016 to the present.

Everything changes in the life of a young 15-year-old Chukchi hunter Lyoshka with the advent of the Internet in the village. He falls in love – for the first time and deeply – with the silent video chat girl. Upon learning that she lives in Detroit, Lyoshka decides on the most desperate act in his life.