Writers

Lucien de Rubempré, a young, lower-class poet, is madly in love with the baroness Louise de Bargeton. The risk of scandal forces them to flee to Paris where they hope to live and love freely. Lucien soon finds rejection and loses the baroness’s support. He finds himself alone, penniless, hungry, and humiliated until the day he seeks revenge by writing controversial – yet banal – articles. Inside the Paris he so coveted, he finds a cynical world where everything – and everyone – can be bought and sold. Can he find his way and remain faithful to his hopes and dreams...? Xavier Giannoli's "Illusions perdues" is based on the novel of the same name by Honoré de Balzac, which takes a close look at French society during the Bourbon Restoration. The film celebrated its premiere at the 78th Venice Film Festival.

Keira Knightley plays the writer Colette, who stunned French society in the 1920s with her scandalous novels. The film follows Colette's rise from peasant girl to darling of the Parisian demimonde. «Colette» provides a riveting glimpse into the young woman's life, exploring her artistic genius as well as the abusive relationship with her mentor, played by Dominic West.

The remarkable and charismatic Ingeborg Bachmann has conquered the male dominated bastion of German-language literature with her poetry. Though still young, Bachmann is at the peak of her career. Her relationship with Max Frisch is passionate, but professional friction begins to disrupt the harmony. When Ingeborg is struggling, her friends are there to help. On a journey into the desert, she finds a way back to herself and – above all – to her writing. Director Margarethe von Trotta has made a number of films about historic, combative and passionate female figures, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt. In her new film, she focuses on Ingeborg Bachmann and the Austrian poetess's relationship with Swiss writer Max Frisch. These characters are brilliantly portrayed by Vicky Krieps ("Corsage") and Ronald Zehrfeld ("The Black Spider"). "Ingeborg Bachmann - Reise in die Wüste" is a visually powerful, elegant and stirring film.

Max Frisch was the last great Swiss intellectual whose "voice" was widely heard and appreciated beyond the borders of his country: a character like none can be found today. Against the backdrop of the late 20th century, the film follows the story of Frisch.

The film tells of the radical life-search by the Swiss writer Paul Nizon, born 1929 in Bern, Switzerland, who became what “he was meant to be” in Paris. Now 90-year-old, Paul Nizon grants insights into his life and work in a self-ironic, direct manner. The intimate portrait of a great literary outsider emerges, for whom the risk of life and the risk of writing merge into one and the same work of art.

This film is no classic author’s portrait, but rather a documentary that through fiction brings Martin Suter’s novels to life and also brings us another step closer to the creator behind them too. «Most often, imagination says more than reality.» Suter weaves from story to story – stories that have been beautifully, cinematographically and impactfully captured, illuminating both his characters and their secrets, and above all his unique cosmos (so near and yet so far) – a world of opposites shaped by the search for stories. This film reveals everything – except the truth.

The feature documentary is an intimate memorial paying tribute to the man, thinker, writer and painter Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The focus is on the hitherto unknown love story between Friedrich Dürrenmatt and his wife Lotti Dürrenmatt-Geissler, a close relationship that lasted for forty years. After Lotti’s death in 1983, Dürrenmatt suffered from a profound crisis, which he overcame with a new, great love. His sister Verena Dürrenmatt, together with his children Peter Dürrenmatt and Ruth Dürrenmatt, share the exclusive story of their brother and father for the first time.

The autobiography of Bruno Wilkomirski, who described his childhood in a concentration camp in it, led to a scandal, because it was exposed as fiction. Interviews and archive material are used to investigate the motives of the man who turned his personal trauma as an orphan in Switzerland into a collective Jewish trauma and thus became a perpetrator himself.

An inspector hunts down Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who becomes a fugitive in his home country in the late 1940s for joining the Communist Party.

Paul Schrader’s visually stunning, collage-like portrait of acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima (played by Ken Ogata) investigates the inner turmoil and contradictions of a man who attempted an impossible harmony between self, art, and society. Taking place on Mishima’s last day, when he famously committed public seppuku, the film is punctuated by extended flashbacks to the writer’s life as well as by gloriously stylized evocations of his fictional works. With its rich cinematography by John Bailey, exquisite sets and costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and unforgettable, highly influential score by Philip Glass, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a tribute to its subject and a bold, investigative work of art in its own right.

With her worldwide success “Fear of Flying”, the New Yorker Erica Jong inspired the sexual liberation of women. She dared to set out for herself and demanded an encounter on equal terms. She wanted to change the world and still wants to today. With her own story, with her humour and with trust in the power of words.

To celebrate the centenary of Jorge Luis Borges' birth, Tristán Bauer has created a very stimulating film essay: Skilfully, respectfully and poetically, he mixes archive documents, conversations and photographs of the writer's life, which reflect Borges' political stance, his problems with the Perón regime and his international successes. Tristán Bauer does not limit himself to a historian's work, he subtly reconstructs the writer's world: infinite fountains of the strange library of Babel, numerous corridors, circles, mirrors, stairs and hexagons.

Based on Patricia Highsmith’s personal writings and accounts of her family and lovers, the film casts new light on the famous thriller writer’s life and oeuvre, permeated by themes of love and its defining influence on identity.

Between 1947 and 1950, more than 80 000 Greek citizens were imprisoned on the isle of Makronisos (Greece) in reeducation camps created to ‘fight the spread of communism’. Among these exiles were a number of writers and poets, including Yannis Ritsos and Tassos Livaditis. Despite the deprivation and torture, these prisoners succeeded in composing poems, which describe their struggle for survival in this world of internment. These texts, some of them buried in the camps, were later found. «Like Lions of stone at the gateway of night» blends these poetic writings with the reeducation propaganda constantly piped through the camps’ loudspeakers. Long tracking shots take us on a trance-like journey through the camp ruins, interrupted along the way by segments from photographic archives. A cinematic essay, which revives the memory of forgotten ruins and a battle lost.

Tatsumi celebrates the life of Japanese comic artist, Yoshihiro Tatsumi. As he becomes successful, he redefines the manga landscape with an alternative genre for adults-and his work plunges into the darker aspects of life.

Ken Bugul is a Senegalese writer who lives in Africa, where her soul is anchored. She has had an exceptional life. Silvia Voser’s film shows her as an iconic figure of the female condition and of relationships between Africa and the West. Ken Bugul is considered one of the most brilliant writers in Senegalese and French of these past decades. Over the years, thanks to her great command of the French language and the uncompromising care she takes with the wording of the meaning of Wolof vocabulary, her mother tongue, her novels have become absolute references in the realm of linguistic studies. "What you read in French in my novels is how we think and speak in Wolof in my village". Ken Bugul’s personal story is overshadowed by Africa’s turbulent history. She was born in 1947 in an isolated village in Senegal, at that time a French colony. Her father was 85 years old and her mother left them before Ken turned five. This was a fundamental event in Ken Bugul’s life. In spite of lacking a mother’s love, she was full of energy and a yearning for freedom, and she received an exceptional education for a village girl of that time. In 1971, she left for Europe to go to university and there she met people from the upper middle class and discovered new ideologies and liberties, modern art, drugs, alcohol, loneliness, incomprehension and disdain, and prostitution to relieve her need for affection. As she says in "The Abandoned Baobab": "For twenty years all I had learned was their thoughts and their emotions. I thought I’d have fun with them, but I ended up even more frustrated. I identified with them, but they didn’t identify with me." She came back to Senegal, a broken, lonely and penniless young woman. People thought she was crazy and she was rejected by her family and society. For two years, she slept in the streets of Dakar, hanging out with outcasts, beggars, prostitutes and artists. Dirty, hungry, almost naked, she started writing her first novel, "The Abandoned Baobab". Worn out, she decided to go back to her family. And there, in her mother’s village, she found refuge with the Serigne (marabout), a wise and much respected man. He took her as his 28th wife, enabling her to re-enter society, and he supported her in her desire to write and to be free. He died in 1981, a year before the publication of her first novel, "The Abandoned Baobab", which was an immediate success. Ken Bugul was invited to present her book all over the world. She met a doctor from Benin, married him and moved to that country, where she gave birth to their daughter Yasmina. Her husband passed away four years later. For the past thirty years, novel after novel, Ken Bugul has painted a picture of her life as a woman, of her loves, of the relationship between her continent and the West. "To write", she says, "is to dazzle the senses, and the senses are colourless." Silvia Voser leads us gently into the secret, tormented world of an artist whose writings show an understanding of the world that is rarely achieved.

A fictionalized documentary about the great Japanese poet Bashô (1644-1694), the spiritual father of Haiku poetry. A monk plays the role of Bashô and walks through the Japanese countryside, following the tracks of the poet’s travel diaries. On the way he writes many of his famous haiku poems. A film about poetry, meditation, zen buddhism and a view of untouched, virgin nature, seen and to understand as a lost paradise.

A fictionalized documentary about the great Japanese poet Bashô (1644-1694), the spiritual father of Haiku poetry. A monk plays the role of Bashô and walks through the Japanese countryside, following the tracks of the poet’s travel diaries. On the way he writes many of his famous haiku poems. A film about poetry, meditation, zen buddhism and a view of untouched, virgin nature, seen and to understand as a lost paradise.

Just like a salmon, this writer traces the course of her life back to the source: she tells us her story, in an interplay of reflections involving her sentiments, her writings, her photos and her friends. Before everyone, she drove, smoked, learned German, freely loved unfaithful men, reflected on Switzerland and its demons during the war and stirred generations of women with her sensitivity and her fury to write, getting straight to the point while drawing material from her own existence without glossing it over.

The filmmaker explores the life and work of the Austrian novelist, playwright and political activist, Peter Handke. The titles of his books sound like the tunes in a jukebox: Offending the Audience and Other Spoken Plays, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick or A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. In the 1960s, he was the definition of a “pop star” author. Yet as soon as he started making the bestseller lists, he turned his back on stardom and went travelling, taking his readers along with him, dragging them into the rhythm and precision of his language and into his own examination of reality. As a young man, and still now, in his daily life, Peter Handke never stopped asking: “Where are we now?” and “How should we live?”

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.

The film tells of the radical life-search by the Swiss writer Paul Nizon, born 1929 in Bern, Switzerland, who became what “he was meant to be” in Paris. Now 90-year-old, Paul Nizon grants insights into his life and work in a self-ironic, direct manner. The intimate portrait of a great literary outsider emerges, for whom the risk of life and the risk of writing merge into one and the same work of art.

Astrid and her siblings count themselves lucky to be growing up on their parents’ parsonage farm in Vimmerby. Although their daily routine is shaped by strict religious values, their mother Hanna and father Samuel always manage to give them security and a sense of freedom. Astrid’s parents enable her to attend a secondary school that would normally be the preserve of wealthy bourgeois kids, and they do not get in the way of the 18-year-old when the owner of the local newspaper offers her a position as a volunteer in the editorial office. Not only does Reinhold Blomberg teach her to proof-read and write texts, he also falls in love with her. When she becomes pregnant, Astrid makes a momentous decision: she refuses to marry him and instead decides to take care of herself and her son Lasse on her own. In her film about the youth of the writer Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002), Pernille Fischer Christensen portrays a strong, independent young woman who breaks social norms and faces difficult decisions with courage. Alba August plays Astrid as both wild and thoughtful, a responsible young woman battling her own feelings of guilt.

A young man is sent to "La Maca", a prison of Ivory Coast in the middle of the forest ruled by its prisoners. With the red moon rising, he is designated by the Boss to be the new "Roman" and must tell a story to the other prisoners.