Regions

A super-powered boy helps a wheelchair-bound policeman in his attempt to bring down a mob kingpin.

Lesya has committed a crime of passion which brings her a seven-year sentence in one of Odessa’s women’s correctional facilities. She has just given birth to her first child, and now she is entering a world populated only by women: inmates, nurses and wardens, women of all ages, wives and widows, daughters, sisters, pregnant women, and women with children too. If not for the color of the uniform, it would sometimes be hard to tell who is who.

Paris, in the early 1990s: a group of young activists is desperately tied to finding the cure against an unknown lethal disease. They target the pharmaceutical labs that are retaining potential cures, and multiply direct actions, with the hope of saving their lives as well as the ones of future generations.

On the way from Berlin to Portugal in her rusty '303' camper van, young biology student Jule picks up hitchhiker Jan. While having intense conversations about the society, the world and the nature of man, they try not to fall in love.

In the week leading up to their 45th wedding anniversary, the Mercers’ get news that causes a crisis in their marriage. The remains of a woman have been found in the Swiss Alps; the body is Katya, Geoff’s former girlfriend, who died in an accident on the glacier 50 years ago. Geoff’s wife Kate is unnerved as she realises that her husband still clings to memories of the dead woman, worrying that she was never more than “second choice”. When Kate looks through stuff Geoff has stored in the attic, she discovers his secret … Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay deliver confident performances in this story of how a crack in faraway, seemingly permanent ice can shatter the tectonics of a marriage that appears completely intact on the surface. With few words and almost imperceptible gestures, they reveal Kate and Geoff standing at the edge of an abyss. The actors’ nuanced portrayals of an ageing couple questioning a relationship that has lasted almost half a century, and struggling to reassure themselves of its future, were rewarded with Silver Bears for acting at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival.

Jonathan Katz strongly believes that candidate Bernie Sanders is the only hope for the United States of America threatened by Donald Trump. Sanders is a voice outside the establishment and has put new values and priorities into his political agenda. Pushed forward by his enthusiasm, Jonathan joins the thousands of women and men that rally around the caucuses supporting Senator Sanders.

In the Guerrasio family Chiara, her sisters and their parents maintain a harmonious relationship. The family, relatives and friends throw a lavish party for the oldest sister's 18th birthday, but when Chiara sees her father, Claudio, and her cousins leave the party abruptly in a black car, the 15-year-old becomes suspicious. When he is still not home the next morning and she gets no answers to her questions, the bright teenager begins her own investigation. Her search takes her into the dark underbelly of the Calabrian mafia where she faces a momentous decision that will decide her own future. A film told in captivating, nocturnal images by director Jonas Carpignano.

Pio is growing up in a coastal town in southern Italy amongst the badly respected Romany community which he is part of, local Italians and African refugees. When his father and brother are arrested, the 14-year-old finds himself in search of a new role model. Although Ayiva, a migrant from Burkina Faso, does not exactly conform to the racist views of Pio’s family, they soon become best friends, and Pio finds a new identification figure in him. Two years after his refugee drama MEDITERRANEA, Jonas Carpignano takes us back to his real-life home of Gioia Tauro where he captures how peripheral groups fight their ground with his skilfully animated camerawork and documentary precision. A CIAMBRA is a charming portrait of one of many Italian youths.

Messies – a balancing act between ingenuity and overload. Are you master of chaos or is chaos master of you? The film offers a multifaceted insight into the everyday lives of four messies. We embark on a trip through their jam-packed treasure chambers, discover their ingenious inventions, their dangerous tinkering and have a look around in their vast archives. We witness the conflicts they have with their relatives, neighbours and institutions that result from their being different. An intimate view of an irritating yet fascinating phenomenon.

When 50-year-old Milena finds out about the terrible past of her seemingly ideal husband, while simultaneously learning of her own cancer diagnosis, she begins an awakening from the suburban paradise she has been living in.

A film based on Jacques Chessex' novel of the same title; featuring André Wilms as Chessex and Bruno Ganz as Arthur Bloch, Swiss Jew killed by Swiss Nazis.

Emma (11) has a perfectly normal family until one day it turns out her dad, Thomas, is transgender. As Thomas becomes Agnete, both father and daughter struggle to hold on to what they had, while accepting that everything has changed.

Sam and Jonathan, a pair of hapless novelty salesman, take us on a kaleidoscopic tour of the human condition in reality and fantasy, unfolding in absurdist episodes: a sing-along at a 1940s beer hall, a randy flamenco teacher, a thirsty King Charles XII of Sweden en route to battle, and a diabolical metaphor for the horrors inflicted by European colonialism. It is a journey that unveils the beauty of single moments, the pettiness of others, life's grandeur, and the humour and tragedy hidden within us all.

Julie is a single parent while also working in a luxury hotel in Paris. When she finally gets an interview for a job she has long hoped for, a nationwide strike breaks out, bringing the public transportation system to a standstill. Julie's fragile equilibrium is shaken and a desperate race against time begins for her. Eric Gravel's sophomore feature premiered at Orizzonti at the Venice Film Festival, where it won Best Director and Best Actress.

Summer 1943, Piedmont, Italy. Milton loves Fulvia who plays with his love: she only likes the depth of his thought and the letters he writes to her. One year later, Milton has joined the Resistance and fights beside other partisans. He learns during a conversation that Fulvia was secretly in love with his best friend Giorgio, a partisan like him. Milton decides to go find Giorgio in the Langhe region of Italy with all its misty hills...But Giorgio has just been arrested by the Fascists. "O, NOW FOREVER FAREWELL THE TRANQUIL MIND, FAREWELL THE PLUMED TROOPS AND THE BIG WARS. THOU HADST BEEN BETTER HAVE BEEN BORN A DOG THAN ANSWER MY WAKED WRATH." SHAKESPEARE

In 1944, four-year-old Argyris Sfountouris survived a brutal massacre committed by the German occupying forces, in which he lost his parents and thirty more relatives. The Greek orphan was sent to the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, Switzerland and obtained a Ph.D in maths and astrophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Now a 66-year-old man of winning charm and melancholy cheerfulness, Argyris has forever been tackling the horror he had to go through as a little boy. He has not tried to come to terms with it emotionally. Rather, he has tried to learn to live with it and to do his utmost to prevent it from happening again. An intimate, reflective film about the quest for peace and the almost insurmountable difficulties linked to true reconciliation – an open-ended journey.

Filmmaker and activist Amandine Gay was listed under ‘X’ as a child in France, abandoned by her mother to grow up in a white family. ‘A Story of One’s Own’ pass the mic to five people who, like herself, carry in themselves the experience of being adopted. Separated not only from their unknown biological parents and countries of birth but also from the story about themselves.

An international smash hit and the world's most popular film about klezmer music, A TICKLE IN THE HEART captures the story of the Epstein Brothers (Max, Willie and Julius) klezmer legends on a joyous and hilarious international tour. The Epsteins are natural performers, and their sense of life, music and family as they tour through places they loved (from Poland to Brooklyn to Florida) is as life affirming and intoxicating as the joyous music they play.

Just like a veil, dense fog hangs over a wet coastal road in Iceland. A car slips out of the curve and crashes down the slope into the depths of the sea. Ever since Ingimundur lost his wife, there is little which brightens his mind. Only his granddaughter knows how to elicit a smile from the loner. What is left of his energy, the retired police officer puts into the renovation of his house, where he leads a secluded life. When a box with his late wife’s remaining possessions appears, Ingimundur is plagued by doubt. How well did he really know her? Was she hiding something from him? Caught between anger and grief, he begins to get to the bottom of his growing mistrust, and what started as a suspicion soon becomes an unpredictable obsession. Set against the backdrop of the spectacularly sublime Icelandic coastal landscape, A WHITE, WHITE DAY is an intense drama that reflects the emotional storms of the grieving protagonist in the magnificent images of the landscape.

The a-ha hit "Take on Me" is one of the most widely played songs of the last century. More than three decades later, this documentary follows the group over a four-year period and tells the story of how three young men realized an impossible dream.

This captivating exploration of Alvar Aalto, the defining figure in Scandic design and one of Europe's greatest modern architects, focuses on his remarkable and loving partnership with wife, Aino. Theirs was a profoundly humanist vision that put people at the centre of design, and ranged from work in furniture design through to huge architectural projects. They mixed with, and influenced, major figures of modernist art and design including Le Corbusier, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Come on a cinematic tour of their iconic buildings all over the world, from a library in Russia, a student dormitory at MIT, an art collector's private house near Paris, to a pavilion in Venice. Narrated by experts in the field and featuring never before seen archive footage, Aalto tells the love story of an extraordinary couple with a great passion for human scale architecture.

About Endlessness sees writer-director Roy Andersson surveying the human condition with equal parts striking clarity, tenderness, and deadpan existential wit.

Five highly original musicians from different countries form the Accordion Tribe. Together they aim to reinforce the original power of the long disdained instrument. The film follows the energetic soundscapes and their performers on a journey through Europe. An extraordinarily intensive documentary on the communicative, connecting power of music.

In 2009 the body of Alice B is found washed up on an African beach. Next to the corpse of the white, 30-year old European woman lie those of a dozen black migrants. Eight years after this tragedy, Pierre-Alain Meier travels to Senegal in the hope of understanding the story behind this shipwreck. When he was Alice’s age, he wandered the streets of Dakar planning the production of the film Hyenas. Like her, he was a white person in Africa. Perhaps like her, he would hoped he could blend in a bit more with his African friends and co-workers and not be so unmistakeably foreign. Following in Alice’s footsteps, the filmmaker today puts his own story into perspective, with humility and affection, allowing us access to a very intimate terrain. Farewell to Africa tells the story of a final journey and sets out to explore the complex ties – both rich and asymmetrical – that have never ceased to exist between Europe and French-speaking Africa. (Luciano Barisone)

Set in the port town of Dover, Mary Hussain suddenly finds herself a widow following the unexpected death of her husband. A day after the burial, she discovers he has a secret just twenty-one miles across the English Channel in Calais.

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.

«Ailo's Journey» tells the fight for the survival of a small wild reindeer, frail and vulnerable to the challenges that punctuate his first year. Its awakening to the wild world is a real tale in the heart of the grandiose landscapes of Lapland.

«Ailo's Journey» tells the fight for the survival of a small wild reindeer, frail and vulnerable to the challenges that punctuate his first year. Its awakening to the wild world is a real tale in the heart of the grandiose landscapes of Lapland.

For as long as they can remember, the Solé family has spent every summer picking the peaches in their orchard in Alcarràs, a small village in Spain’s Catalonia region. But this year’s crop may well be their last, as they face eviction. The new plans for the land, which include cutting down the peach trees and installing solar panels, cause a rift in this large, tight-knit family. For the first time, they face an uncertain future and risk losing more than their orchard.

The film is a study of the 20th century cult of personality - the myth, the lure and the corruption of the political hero who is a fusion of two characters. Drawing from the so-called Dilessi incident of 1870 (updated in the film to the dawn of the twentieth century), this Megalexandros is a bandit of the sort that typically plagued nineteenth century Greece. Wrapped in the spiritual cloak of yet another Megalexandros - a legendary Greek liberator and King Arthur-like figure whose tale originated in 1453 under Turkish domination and has come down through oral tradition over the centuries - he becomes a leader of mysterious charisma. He kidnaps a group of English aristocrats and takes them to a mountain village where he is attempting to establish an agrarian commune among a company of Italian anarchists. The socialist hero becomes a Stalin-like tyrant whose trademark silence only reinforces his power. The film is a true work of demythification - from the roots of myth to the false promises of the new century.

Antoine and Ariane had a long affair. Then she left him because of Alexandre and he went abroad. Today Antoine is back. Ariane is absent but a man opens the door for him... Ariane has also left him. But who is Alexandre? A film with a light and refreshing humor.

The mayor of Lyon, Paul Théraneau, is in a delicate position. After 30 years in politics, he is running out of ideas and is faced with a feeling of existential emptiness. To overcome this, Paul hires a young and brilliant philosopher, Alice Heimann. Then follows a dialogue between two diametrically opposed personalities who will turn their certainties upside down.

Alice Schwarzer has always been a polarizing force. As a well-known television personality, she has divided couples on the sofa in German-speaking countries and encouraged women to emancipate themselves. The film shows a side of Schwarzer that goes beyond the influential feminist and journalist we know from her autobiography.

“Höhenfeuer” is both a story of childhood and of a love affair: The deaf-born “Bub” and his sister “Belli” live with their parents on a remote farm in the mountains. The father intentionally resists the modern age: “I'd rather beat him to death than put him in a home”. After school Belli is not only a servant in her own home but also her younger brother's teacher. From early childhood, they have been an inseparable pair. They love one another. “Holy Mother of God, what sort of children have I?” wails the resigned mother, when the two children do things that are not “normal”. This is just the beginning of the story… Had the film been made 100 years ago – it would have been a saga.

A Nurse, a Paramedic, a Gymnast and her Coach have formed a service for hire. They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends, or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps while their leader, the Paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although the Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the Nurse doesn’t.

Dusk, alpine summer time. Through a milk funnel, the dairymen, rarely a dairymaid, call out the alpine blessing or Bättruef. Every day, in all weathers. They ask God and the saints to avert harm from the alp, as loudly as possible, because as far as their voice can be heard, the protective spell should also work. At the mercy of the forces of nature in the mountain world at night, the alpine farmers experience their own existence as part of a greater whole. They call out the Alpine blessing out of deep inner conviction.

Swiss-Japanese filmmaker Aya Domenig, the granddaughter of a doctor on duty for the Red Cross during the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, approaches the experience of her deceased grandfather by tracing the lives of a doctor and of former nurses who once shared the same experience. While gathering the memories and present views of these very last survivors, the nuclear disaster in Fukushima strikes and history seems to repeat itself.

Felix is on the edge. He has got just one thing on his mind: Valerie - his wife, who has recently left him. He returns to the place of their final break-up. Valerie's ex-lover Thomas is also here, but not for sentimental reasons. By chance the two men meet in a restaurant. By chance Felix discovers who he is facing. And then starts the inscrutable game.

Cuno Amiet lived from 1868-1961, yet seen today many of his pictures have a contemporary edge. Amiet was a Swiss pioneer of modern painting along with Ferdinand Hodler and Giovanni Giacometti. The film visits three highly individual Amiet collectors in Dallas, Geneva and Studen, near Biel. Surrounded by Amiet’s works they tell us what part these paintings play in their lives.

Georg and Anna are around 80, cultivated music professors in retirement. The daughter, also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day Anna has a seizure - it is the beginning of a test for the love of the two.

Between goats, cows and the Alps, Fabiano (38) becomes a father. But the idyll is deceptive: he tries hard to make the alpine cheese the way his drop-out parents did in the 70s. In addition to debts, feelings of guilt also gnaw at him. Last year, a Macedonian moonlighter had a fatal accident. Since then, his death has never let Fabiano go. How can he and his girlfriend Eva build a life together with their offspring under such difficult circumstances? Set against the imposing and oppressively quiet backdrop of the Ticino Alps, Aldo Gugolz’s film turns out to be an exciting tightrope walk between a criminal case and a sensitive portrait of a young farmer.

16-year-old Bella and Vipulan are part of a generation convinced its very future is in danger. Between climate change and the 6th mass extinction of wildlife, their world could well be inhabitable 50 years from now. They have sounded the alarm over and over, but nothing has really changed. So they've decided to tackle the root of the problem: our relationship with the living world. Over the course of an extraordinary journey, they come to realize just how deeply humans are tied to all other living species. And that by saving them... we're also saving ourselves. Humans thought they could distance themselves from nature, but humans are part and parcel of nature. For man is, after all, an Animal.

9-year-old Anna goes to school and spends her free afternoons with her dolls. One day, however, everything turns out differently: when she copies herself in the school's photocopier, it spits out a second Anna. An exciting game of mistaken identity begins!

Glarus, november 1981: the little daughter of a distinguished family finds in her milk at breakfast some pins. The maid Anna Göldin arouses suspicion, a woman of complex sensuality. Both, master and daughter, are under a spell. Anna Göldin is at once dismissed. After that, the daughter is for weeks spitting out 106 pins and her left leg is getting paralyzed. Anna Göldin is getting accused, having bewitched the child. She is fetched back to Glarus. And she can heal the child. Therefor she produces evidence of being a witch. During torture she admits all accusations. On June 18, 1782 she is put to death. Anna Göldin ist he last woman in Europe, who is convicted as a witch by an official high court.

Los Angeles, today. Henry is a stand-up comedian with a fierce sense of humor. Ann, a world-renowned opera singer. Under the spotlight, they form a wholesome and glamorous couple. The birth of their first child, Annette, a mysterious little girl with an exceptional destiny, will turn their lives upside down.

Another History tells Swiss history between 1910 and 1991 from a female perspective. In her three-part documentary, Tula Roy presents interviews with politically active women as well as contemporary witnesses and uses visual and audio documents to illuminate the struggle of women for their rights, their left-wing movements, labor struggles and anti-fascist commitment.

The young, upbeat teacher Antoinette is looking forward to her summer vacation with her secret lover Vladimir, the attractive father of one of her students. But nothing comes of it: Vladimir spontaneously books a donkey trekking in the Cevennes with his family. Antoinette decides to follow him on the Stevenson Trail, taking her straw hat, a pink rolling suitcase and Patrick, the donkey who accompanies her. The stubborn animal demands all her patience, yet turns out to be a good listener and leads her to completely new, refreshing insights about life and love.

Facing the consequences of a violent uprooting, Mateo Sobode Chiqueno has been recording stories, songs, and testimonies of his Ayoreo people since the seventies. In an attempt to preserve fragments of a disappearing culture, Mateo walks across communities in the arid and desolate Paraguayan Chaco region, and registers on cassettes the experiences of other Ayoreo who, like him, were born in the vast forest, free and nomadic, without any contact with white civilization, until religious missionaries forced them to abandon their ancestral territory, their means of subsistence, their beliefs and their home.

Amidst a worldwide pandemic that causes sudden amnesia, middle-aged Aris (Aris Servetalis) finds himself enrolled in a recovery program designed to help unclaimed patients build new identities. Prescribed daily tasks on cassette tapes so he can create new memories and document them on camera, Aris slides back into ordinary life, meeting Anna (Sofia Georgovasili), a woman who is also in recovery. Through images deadpan, strange and surreal, Greek writer-director Christos Nikou posits a beguiling reflection on memory, identity, and loss, exploring how a society might handle an irreversible epidemic through one man’s story of self-discovery. Are we the sum of the images we compile and display of ourselves, or are we something richer, and deeper?

The story of three men of Turkish descent who grew up in Switzerland but never got a Swiss passport. After run-ins with the law they are deported to the country where their parents originally came from, a place they hardly know. Not only do the men find themselves in a country where they feel like complete strangers, they also have to cope with life in a society that is moving quickly toward a dictatorship. The film explores different concepts of cultural and national identity.

Temporality and age are inherent in every object and creature and, depending on one’s outlook, may transcend to infinity. Schaub explores, together with the architects Peter Zumthor, Peter Märkli and Alvaro Siza Vieira, the artists James Turrell and Cristina Iglesias and drummer virtuoso Jojo Mayer, the magic of sacred spaces, defined here as far more than church buildings. Who owns spirituality?

A Finnish man goes to the city to find a job after the mine where he worked is closed and his father commits suicide.

Marina is 23 and lives together with her father in an industrial village on the Greek coast. She finds the human species to be peculiar, almost daunting, if it weren't for Bella, her only and very unconventional friend. Marina derives her first sexual insights from the animal documentaries of Sir David Attenborough - "Attenberg", as she calls him. Bella, on the other hand, shows Marina a completely different approach to her own sexuality. This leads to bizarre moments in Marina's approach to an unknown table football player, as well as in discussions with her sick father. Her dad, an architect unimpressed by the twentieth century, prepares for his self-determined "exit" from life. He considers this epoch to be overestimated and does not want to surrender to his cancer. Using these two men and their friend Bella, Marina examines the last mysteries of the human fauna.

The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.

Adrien, a 70-year-old mountain farmer from the Valais, proposes a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway to his friends. The taciturn mountain men board the train, but they never really let go. Without cards and white wine, nothing works. Only Adrien makes it as far as Beijing: For the stubborn farmer, the long journey ultimately becomes a journey to himself, to his own feelings.

A French woman hits menopause, quits her job as waitress, and feels everything going downhill. But then she meets her old love from before she got married, had 2 daughters and got divorced. Is this a new beginning?This film is the story of the collective struggle to build this bridge. It is a celebration of human labour!

After five years studying in Paris, Arash has not adjusted to life there and has decided to return to Iran to live. Hoping to change his mind, his two friends Hossein and Ashkan convince him to take a last trip through France.

While hitchhiking from Sofia to Ruse, Kamen meets Avé, a 17-year-old runaway girl. With each ride they hitch, Avé invents new identities for them, and her compulsive lies get Kamen deeper and deeper into trouble. Reluctantly drawn into this adventure, Kamen begins to fall in love with the fleeting Avé.

Yvan De Wiel, a private banker from Geneva, is going to Argentina in the midst of a dictatorship to replace his partner, the object of the most worrying rumors, who disappeared overnight. Between hushed lounges, swimming pools, and gardens under surveillance, a remote duel takes place between two bankers who, despite different methods, are the accomplices of a discreet and merciless form of colonization.

75-year-old Giuseppe De Metrio has spent 30 years in Geneva, as foreign worker for the Broyer company. Upon retirement, he returned to Puglia, Italy, where his family had continued to live. His only grandchild, 7-year-old Carla, is blind. The whole family looks forward hopefully to the day when Carla’s sight can be restored by means of a cornea transplantation. After a heart attack, Giuseppe decides to wait no longer and returns to Switzerland to ask his former boss Mr. Broyer for the money necessary for the operation, as an old promise binds the two men. Intended as a 48-hour trip, Giuseppe and Carla’s visit in Switzerland becomes a journey that both grandfather and granddaughter never dreamt of.

Emi, a school teacher, finds her career and reputation under threat after a personal sex tape is leaked on the Internet. Forced to meet the parents demanding her dismissal, Emi refuses to surrender to their pressure.

Every ten years, one of the largest public festivals in Switzerland puts the small town of Baden in a positive state of emergency. What motivates countless people to help shape the "Badenfahrt" and make an incredible commitment? The 78-minute documentary "BADENFAHRT - FEST VEREINT" shows the emotions of those who put the festival on its feet. The feel-good movie is a plea for volunteering, for diversity and shows what positive things can be achieved together.

A failed author, a wife in hiding, a clandestine gay IT-specialist meet in an Iraqi café in London. Incited by a radical Sheik, the author's nephew attacks them and turns their lives upside down.

Bruno - former bank director turned gardener - can't forget his past. He saves the life of the unemployed Stefano. However, in order to take revenge on his former business partner Ernesto, he draws the young Italian and his girlfriend Maria into his diabolical plan: a robbery of his bank. The thriller starring Bruon Ganz is set in Lugano and is the first official Swiss-Italian co-production.

Summer, 1980. Barbara, a doctor, has applied for an exit visa from the GDR (East Germany). Now, as punishment, she has been transferred from Berlin to a small hospital out in the country, far from everything. Jörg, her lover from the West, is already planning her escape. Barbara waits, keeping to herself. The new apartment, the neighbors, summertime, the countryside – none of that means anything to her. Working as a pediatric surgeon under her new boss Andre, she is attentive when it comes to the patients, but quite distanced toward her colleagues. Her future, she feels, will begin later. But Andre confuses her. His confidence in her professional abilities, his caring attitude, his smile. Why does he cover for her when she helps the young runaway Sarah? Does he have an assignment to keep track of her? Is he in love? But as the day of her planned escape quickly approaches, Barbara starts to lose control. Over herself, her plans, over love.

A film from and about rural Europe capturing a timeless cultural event: a series of head-to-head fights of cows, not bulls, set in a valley in sunny Southern Switzerland. The fights are sudden snorting seesaws, explosions of mass and muscle, archaic and wild. We follow three concurrent story lines: an anxious farmer with his beloved contender, a neurotic unemployed reporter from Zurich come to find a story and a gang of adolescent boys on mopeds trying to catch a pretty girl's eye. This black and white film tries to capture the balance between fascinating tradition and modernity.

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 three-year journey with actor Bruno Ganz. He plays various roles in various places, but he also plays Bruno Ganz – filming and directing friends. Again and again he works on the role of Dr. Faust, the figure who – speaking for us all – desperately wants to discover “what holds the world together at the core”. A thousand days of searching for one's own destiny, with despair as the only companion, and placing hope in the creative power of poetry.

Is it possible to talk with animals? The filmmaker explores the world of animal communication. She wants to understand her excited dog Bina. On her international journey she meets two horse teachers, an animal communicator, a biologist, an animal therapist and the founder of The Trust Technique. Salome discovers astonishing possibilities of animal communication, whether it's with her dog Bina, other dogs, horses, cats, dolphins, or a goat.

Young Irina, a Russian call girl, finds herself in a fairytale Alpine country. There, her clientele grows to include representatives from business, politics, the military and the media. As a reward for her services, she is to receive the coveted Swiss passport. But through a misunderstanding, she triggers the coup d'état planned many years ago by a forgotten patriotic organization: the Berezina Alarm. With unforeseen consequences for her and Switzerland.

The Kempf family lives on three different farms at different altitudes in the Schächen Valley in the Canton of URI. ten times a year they move from farm to farm with their livestock: up the mountain in the spring, down to the valley in autumn – and then up again in winter to farm their called “Pfaffen”, at an altitude of 1725 meters above sea level. This is where they feed their livestock the hav they have collected from the steep alpine slopes during the summer. The film is an intimate portrait of a family, with who the farmer's grandparents and his sister also live. Over the course of the year, the film director and the family developed a close relationship, close enough to render visible the problems of modern times in conjunction with this archaic lifestyle, problems which the farmers refuse to let get them down.

For the German artist Joseph Beuys, art was used for provocation and he wanted to "provoke" discussions with his works. He was a sculptor, performer and draftsman.

Boobs. Melons. Bazookas: American director Kristen Vermilyea has large breasts, neck pain, back pain and balance issues.
 Her decision to get a reduction triggers questions about identity, aging and bodies. Kristen departs on a series of wacky and humorous adventures before going under the knife.

Talented swimmer, motivated apprentice, cool buddy: Beyto is in the midst of life, with a bright future ahead of him. One would think. But when the only son of a Turkish migrant family falls in love with his coach Mike, an ideal world falls to pieces. In shock and ashamed, his parents only see one way out: Beyto must marry in order to save face and tradition. They lure him to their home village and plan his wedding with Seher, his childhood friend. Suddenly, Beyto finds himself in a disruptive love triangle: How can he get back to Mike without destroying Seher’s future? A subtle, summerly sensuous love story about three young people.

Although sixteen-year-old Peter would rather lie by the swimming pool watching girls, he instead has to monitor customers in a supermarket to make sure they don't steal anything. He has problems at work, for example when he sees a suspicious customer in a supermarket but doesn't dare to talk to him. At home, he constantly receives teachings from his pedantic father; his girlfriend has laid eyes on someone else. With amateur actors and Jan Nemecek's poetic camera work, young Miloš Forman captures the authenticity of ordinary summer days in a small Czech town in the early 1960s. At the same time he expresses the feelings of awakening rebellion in the youth of the Eastern Bloc, just a few years before the Prague Spring. A seismographic film and a strong contemporary document.

A revelatory, thrilling and emotional journey behind the scenes of Blue Note Records. Since 1939, Blue Note has been inspiring generations of musicians in search of individual expression. Through current recording sessions, rare archive material and in talks with Blue Note stars such as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Ambrose Akinmusire, Sophie Huber tells of the dawn of jazz to Hip-Hop.

A fast-paced film about people whose feet are their primitive and powerful instrument of artistic expression. Beginning with “bödele” in Central Switzerland, this film journeys from tap dance and flamenco to Irish dance. The rhythmic stamping of the shoes is reminiscent of ethnic ritualistic folk dances. Evolving from the “dances of the folk” are show and competition dance. The film provides insight into passionate dancers and people who express joy, desire and sadness through rhythm with their feet.

Janusz is not a man to be easily shocked. As coroner he undertakes precise research, analysing the crime scene in minute detail. Despite the extreme situations he comes up against, he works hard. Perhaps too hard. Yet when faced with his anorexic daughter Olga, still grieving for her dead mother, he feels helpless. Fearing that she might kill herself, he commits her to a clinic where Anna, a psychologist, carries out her duties. Years before, Anna lost her baby to cot-death and now sequesters herself and her big dog in a heavily barricaded flat and conjures up spirits who communicate with the living from beyond the grave. Małgorzata Szumowska works with elements of black comedy to tell of the difficulties people encounter when struggling to cope with the loss of loved ones. The film explores the fear of and yet longing for intimacy, self-harm due to mental anguish and escaping into the esoteric. A complex meditation on the loneliness of the heart and the conflict between the rational and belief in a supernatural universe.

The rich Bodenbauer practices factory farming, while his tenant Hans, does not like the idea of industrial animal farming. But he seems compelled to do so after Bodenbauer terminated a large piece of his land. The old veterinarian in the village encourages him not to give up easily.

It is love at first sight for fun-loving Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield) meeting the smart blonde Diana (Claire Foy) in 1950s England. Things appear to be going perfectly, until one day Robin is diagnosed with polio. Paralysed from the neck down, doctors give him just months to live. Against all medical advice and the fact that no polio patient has ever survived outside a hospital environment, Diana takes her husband home. Together they begin a battle, not only against the illness and its resulting constraints it causes, but also against the prejudices they experience. The pair set off on a journey with such dedication and zest for life that it is not only on their own lives that they begin to have an influence… Andy Serkis’ classically staged directing debut is based on the true story of the Brit Robin Cavendish.

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.

Beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker Anders Østergaard, brings us close to Burma’s video journalists who insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country despite risking torture and life in jail. Armed with small handycams they make their undercover reportages, smuggle the material out of the country, and broadcast back into Burma via satellite or offered as free usage for international media.

During World War II, Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Gianni (Vittorio Gassman) and Nicola (Stefania Sandrelli) are activists fighting for Italy's liberation from Nazi occupation. When the war ends and their ideals must change, the three men take different life paths. Antonio and Nicola incorporate their beliefs into adulthood, whereas Gianni takes a more affluent job as a lawyer's assistant. When the group reunites after several decades, their discourse unearths hostility and unsettling realizations.

Max is a battle-weary veteran of the wedding-planning racket. His latest — and last — gig is a hell of a fête, involving stuffy period costumes for the caterers, a vain, hyper- sensitive singer who thinks he's a Gallic James Brown, and a morose, micromanaging groom determined to make Max's night as miserable as possible. But what makes the affair too bitter to endure is that Max's colleague and ostensible girlfriend, Joisette, seems to have written him off, coolly going about her professional duties while openly flirting with a much younger server. It's going to be a very long night… especially once the groom's aerial serenade gets underway.

Adam, a simple fisherman's son, joins the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the epicenter of power in Sunni Islam. On the first day of classes, the Grand Imam at the head of the institution suddenly dies. Adam finds himself at the heart of a relentless power struggle between the country's religious and political elites.

This so-called “film” is a rather manic story of seventeen young braves who, spitting in the face of all kind of dangers, don their dark glasses and set off on a desperate trek from the working-class quarter of town to the Eldorado of the fashionable waterfront, replete with green, wavelapped and wind-caressed beaches. But the way is long, and the city’s labyrinthine streets are infested with a bizarre array of loitering, huddled human wrecks, stray dogs, and permanently defunct streetlamps. Only the strongest survive the course, and what happens to them isn’t a lot to write home about. Life is tough, and the world keeps changing its shape.

A mediocre musician dreams of becoming a rock star: Julius sets out to find legendary American guitar maker Elmore Silk, with whom he wants to make a deal. He follows Silk's tracks and meets important people from his past. A journey during which the "American Dream" is taken ad absurdum. Atmospherically staged road movie through the USA with a soundtrack by Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Arto Lindsay, Joe Strummer and David Johansen.

They don’t wear uniforms or carry weapons. They have no bodyguards, but their missions lead them to the most dangerous parts of the world. They are equipped with laptops, cameras and sound recorders. Despite impossible working conditions, they collect the evidence for indictments against those who ordered some of the most serious crimes of our time – committed in Darfur, Uganda, The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic – they are the investigators of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

After 20 years of marriage, Maria decides to leave her husband. She moves into room 212 at the hotel across the street, with a bird’s-eye view of her apartment, her husband and the life she shared with him. While she wonders if she made the right decision, many of the people in her life offer their opinions on the matter. They intend to let her know, whether she likes it or not, on what proves to be a life-changing evening.

The film paints the portrait of an old man who decides to abandon his comfortable bourgeois way of life and live with a Bohemian couple. There he rediscovers his freedom to think and his joie de vivre.

In the middle of the Aegean Sea, on a luxury yacht, six men on a fishing trip decide to play a game. During this game, things will be compared, measured and blood will be tested. Friends will become rivals, but at the end of the voyage, when the game is over, the winner will wear the victorious signet ring: the "Chevalier".

The theme of Fredi M. Murer's contribution to the episode film Swissmade is "Switzerland after us". Murer's episode takes place in the year 2069. An "integrated citizen with a latent tendency to become an unintegrated citizen" is commissioned by the "Brain Center" to produce a film report about the unknown mission of a foreign being. The alien being is an extraterrestrial designed by H. R. Giger long before ALIEN with a built-in camera and tape, which travels across the earth in the year 2069 to explore current conditions. The film reporter is Murer himself. Without exception, the performers in real life were authentic 1968 activists, some of whom later made political or artistic careers. In addition to this: Murer's freaky "Chicorée" with Urban Gwerder and one of the most spontious and colourful film ends ever.

«Let's make a documentary together,» Chrigu says. «At some point, I'll get out of it». The documentary tells the story of a young man who had big plans for his life. After an advanced stage tumor is discovered in him at the age of 24, he fights for his life. Jan Gassmann accompanies him with his camera. The result is not a film about death, but rather about life. Powerful and without false sentimentality as well as deeply touching authenticity.

Croatia, January 1992. In the midst of the Yugoslav Wars, Chris, a young Swiss journalist is found dead in mysterious circumstances. He was wearing the uniform of an international mercenary group. Anja Kofmel was his cousin. As a little girl, she used to admire this handsome young man; now a grown-up woman, she decides to investigate his story, trying to understand what really was the involvement of Chris in the conflict

The shooting of this farming chronicle in the Gruyère region lasted a whole year, from July 1989 to July 1990. A year of work and festivities in the family of Conrad and Louise Bapst, their children and grandchildren, who live in La Roche (canton of Fribourg). In summer, part of the family goes up to the upper pastures with the herd, and, for the next three months, will move six times as the grass for the cows grows in higher and higher places. Down at the farm, the rest of the family bring in the hay, the after crop, and tend the vegetable garden.Then come the autumn and winter chores, feast-days, the sale of cheeses, voting for or against the Swiss Army, the meetings to discuss whether or not to join the European Union. A patient and human approach to an almost silent minority of Switzerland.

June 1944. Allied Forces stand on the brink: a massive army is secretly assembled on the south coast of Britain, poised to re-take Nazi-occupied Europe. One man stands in their way: Winston Churchill. Behind the iconic figure and rousing speeches: a man who has faced political ridicule, military failure and a speech impediment. An impulsive, sometimes bullying personality - fearful, obsessive and hurting. Fearful of repeating, on his disastrous command, the mass slaughter of 1915, when hundreds of thousands of young men were cut down on the beaches of Gallipoli. Obsessed with fulfilling historical greatness: his destiny. Exhausted by years of war and plagued by depression, Churchill is a shadow of the hero who has resisted Hitler's Blitzkrieg. Should the D-Day landings fail, he is terrified he'll be remembered as an architect of carnage. Political opponents sharpen their knives. General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery are increasingly frustrated by Churchill's attempts to stop the invasion. King George VI must intervene. Only the support of Churchill's brilliant, yet exasperated wife Clementine can halt the Prime Minister's physical and mental collapse. The untold story of Britain's most celebrated leader, uncovering the true nature of Churchill's herculean war-time status and his vital relationship with "Clemmie" - his backbone and total confidant...the love that inspired him to greatness.

Photo?, the clown calls the public from the ring of the circus. The delicious number like the even more famous soap bubble number and other Pic classics can be enjoyed in "Le Cirque de Pic". They form the heart of Thomas Ott's affectionate portrait film. Emil Steinberger tells how he was enthusiastic about Pic from the beginning and how he recommended the clown from St.Gallen to the Roncalli Circus director. Ott reviews Pic's career. Pic himself tells how varied and romantic the spartan life in the circus caravan was. Photos show that the subtle art of the clown cannot be separated from the person Richard Hirzel, who knows how to enchant with his empathic poetry. The portrait closes with scenes from the current programme "Comical Bones", in which Pic shines as the narrator. It is Emil once again who praises Pic's subtle and expressive facial expressions.

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry transforms Jacques Dubochet’s life. Passing from the shadows to the light, he is solicited from all sides. What can he do with this voice, which is now being heard by everyone? How to define the struggles to be fought? How to become a “Nobel Citizen”, with the objective of assuming responsibility as a researcher and member of the human community? A speech by Greta Thunberg turns everything upside down.

Due to a huge difference in the way they perceive life, the relationship between the students and their new German language teacher becomes critically tense. When one of the students commits suicide, her classmates accuse the teacher of being responsible for her death. The realisation that things are not so black and white comes too late.

Leo and Remi are two thirteen-year-old best friends, whose seemingly unbreakable bond is suddenly, tragically torn apart. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Lukas Dhont's second film is an emotionally transformative and unforgettable portrait of the intersection of friendship and love, identity and independence, and heartbreak and healing.

The young Miloš Hrma, who speaks with misplaced pride of his family of misfits and malingerers, is engaged as a newly trained station guard in a small railway station during the Second World War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He admires himself in his new uniform, and looks forward, like his prematurely-retired railwayman father, to avoiding real work. The sometimes pompous stationmaster is an enthusiastic pigeon-breeder with a kind wife, but is envious of the train dispatcher Hubička's success with women. Miloš holds an as-yet platonic love for the pretty, young conductor Máša. The experienced Hubička presses for details of their relationship and realizes that Miloš is still a virgin. The idyll of the railway station is periodically disturbed by the arrival of the councillor, Zednicek, a Nazi collaborator, who spouts propaganda at the staff without success. At her initiative, Máša spends the night with Miloš, but in his youthful excitability he ejaculates prematurely before achieving penetration and then is unable to perform sexually; and the next day, despairing, he attempts suicide. He is saved, and a young doctor explains to him that ejaculatio praecox is normal at Miloš's age. The doctor recommends Miloš to "think of something else" (at which point Miloš volunteers an interest in football), and to seek the assistance of an experienced woman. During the nightshift, Hubička flirts with the young telegraphist, Zdenička, and imprints her thighs and buttocks with the office's rubber stamps. Her mother sees the stamps and complains to Hubička's superiors, and the ensuing scandal helps to frustrate the stationmaster's ambition of being promoted to inspector. The Germans and their collaborators are on edge, since their trains are being attacked by the partisans. A glamorous Resistance agent (a circus artist in peacetime), code-named Viktoria Freie, delivers a time bomb to Hubička for use in blowing up a large ammunition train. At Hubička's request, the "experienced" Viktoria also helps Miloš to resolve his sexual problem. The next day, at the crucial moment when the ammunition train is approaching, Hubička is caught up in a farcical disciplinary hearing, overseen by Zednicek, over his rubber stamping of Zdenička's backside. In Hubička's place, Miloš, liberated by his experience with Viktoria from his former passivity, takes the time bomb and drops it from a semaphore gantry, that extends transversely above the tracks, onto the train. A machine-gunner on the train, spotting Miloš, sprays him with bullets, and his body falls onto the train. With the Nazi collaborator Zednicek, winding up the disciplinary hearing, dismissing the Czech people as "nothing but laughing hyenas" (a phrase actually employed by the senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, the implicit retort to his jibe comes in the form of a huge series of explosions that destroys the train. Now Hubička and the other railwaymen are indeed laughing - to express their joy at the blow to the Nazi occupiers - and it is left to a wistful Máša to pick up Miloš's uniform cap, hurled across the station by the power of the blast. (wp)

The first real professional success for famed French actress Maria Enders was twenty years ago as the co-lead in writer Wilhelm Melchoir's play and subsequent movie "Maloja Snake", he who picked Maria, then an unknown, personally. She played Sigrid, an opportunistic eighteen year old in an emotionally dependent lesbian relationship with forty year old Helena, who was at a vulnerable stage of her life. Maria has turned down the play's upcoming London revival in which she would now play Helena, it remounted by director Klaus Diesterweg. Her reasons for turning down the role are many including: being at a vulnerable stage of her own life going through a painful divorce; remembering the suicide of Susan Rosenberg, the original Helena, following the original run of the play, the suicide purportedly mirroring what happens to Helena; and the painful memories of the production in still having hard feelings toward who was her older male costar, Henryk Wald, with who she had an affair at the time. Maria reconsiders and accepts the role when Wilhelm unexpectedly passes away, she hearing the news en route to the Zurich Film Festival where she was to accept an award on recluse Wilhelm's behalf. Maria begins to regret her decision, largely due to having to work with nineteen year old Jo-Ann Ellis as Sigrid, Jo-Ann a trained actress whose Hollywood lifestyle is making her self-destruct, this behavior which Maria, who hates the Internet and the Hollywood gossip on it, did not know before signing the contract. But what may be most difficult for Maria is the role opening up her own professional relationship and friendship with her younger American personal assistant, Valentine, the two who are staying at Wilhelm's mountain retreat in Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps, where Maria is preparing for the play and where many of the locations were inspiration for the play's themes

In the ruins of post-war Poland, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) fall deeply, obsessively and destructively in love. As performing musicians forced to play into the Soviet propaganda machine, they dream of escaping to the creative freedom of the West. But one day, as they spot their chance to make a break for Paris, both make a split decision that will mark their lives forever.

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.

Originally planned as a joint train trip with her lover, the shy Finn Laura embarks on the journey to the north of Russia to visit ancient rock paintings alone by herself. When she is assigned her sleeping compartment, she finds her new companion is a rather obnoxious and crude vodka-drinking, shaven-headed miner named Ljoha. Over the next few days, the disparate passengers are forced to get along with each other in the close quarters of the compartment. Only when Laura gradually gives up her dismissive attitude it becomes apparent that the two have much more in common than she ever imagined. Director Juho Kuosmanen (THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MÄKI) sends two outsiders on an amusing and deeply touching journey during which they are confronted - without kitsch - with the truth of their feelings.

When two friends collect money for the so-called “suffering in America” in the streets of Accra, is it for fun, political provocation, or a prophecy? Two Swiss filmmakers will answer these questions with the help of seven musicians from Ghana – M3NSA, Wanlov The Kubolor, Adomaa, Worlasi, Akan, Mutombo Da Poet, and Poetra Asantewa – who have written new songs and produced video clips especially for the documentary film Contradict. Tomorrow’s ideas and trends are emerging more decentralized than ever in a globalized world. What do global developments and shifts in values look like from the ground up in Ghana and the African continent? How do we want to confront and contradict those changes? Can new visions for the future become global realities?

Asli first sets eyes on Saeed in the mid-1990s at a fairground as he is anxiously stepping off a merry-go-round just before the ride begins. They get to know each other while spinning bottles at a party in their student hall of residence. Asli is fascinated by Saeed’s charisma and self-confidence. The two students marry secretly even though Asli’s mother is against the relationship. In a mosque in Hamburg, they promise to stay together and keep each other’s secrets. Caught between asserting herself, conforming to her traditional parental home and her self-sacrificing love, Asli tries to find her own way in life. Then Saeed disappears. His decision changes Asli’s life – before it shakes the whole world. Anne Zohra Berrached’s film comprises several layers that are all of equal importance. It is a love story, but it is also an exploration of cultural differences, truth and faith, trust and delusion. After Two Mothers and 24 Weeks, the director once again demonstrates her particular ability to reveal the private lives that exist behind the politics, as well as her great sensitivity when working with actors

“Mais im Bundeshuus-le génie helvétique” (“Corn in Parliament”) is a vertiginous journey down the corridors of the Federal Parliament building in Bern. Constructed as a feature film, it follows the adventures of a parliamentary committee established to create a bill on genetic engineering (Gen-Lex). This political thriller reveals both sides of the coin, namely that of those who have invested, economic interests and of those who fear the negative effects of this revolutionary technology. Amusing, tender, and humane, all the while clearly illustrating the limits of the system, the film functions as a tale of universal power.

A pious 20-year-old juvenile delinquent is sent to work at a sawmill in a small town; on arrival, he dresses up as a priest and accidentally takes over the local parish. The arrival of this young, charismatic preacher is an opportunity for the local community to begin the healing process after a tragedy that happened a year prior.

»Crime and Punishment« is a modern adaptation of the classical crime story by F.M. Dostoevsky – but faithful in its spirit to the original. The principal character – a young slaughterhouse worker – commits a senseless crime. Through his act he finally drifts out of society and into loneliness. Only a young girl who accidentally arrives at the scene of the crime wants to follow him. Guilt and the tightening net of the police throw a shadow over their desperate love affair. The nocturnal concrete jungle serves as a backdrop for the struggle for intellectual supremacy between the police and the murderer. Rahikainen’s only weapon in this struggle is his total indifference to everything. »Crime and Punishment« is, however, first and foremost a film about the last desperate rebellion of a young man against society. The society that – as we know – is a merciless machine. Perhaps we are all guilty – guilty of what? This unbearable question faces us everywhere, hands on hips, sneering at us. As you wish. We’ll die anyway.

Suter is a lonely guy, constantly in motion, escaping his true self. During the day, he travels through Switzerland, creating new identities and incognito evaluating the quality of customer service in shops and hotel rooms, while at night, he secretly observes the life of another lonely person: Anna, a rebel struggling with complicated grief. But this fragile balance is soon destroyed, when Anna finds out about Suter’s dark secret.

One of the highlights of Vera Chytilová’s filmography is the grotesque moral «Daisies» (1966). The surrealistic narrative about a pair of young women who decide to be as corrupt as the world around them does not arise from concrete socio-political realities. As a result, the biting account of conformity, petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness, and the limits of light-heartedness has timeless qualities. Daisies marked the beginning of Chytilová’s collaboration with Ester Krumbachová, who contributed to the eccentric costumes and script. The collage-like visual component then gave a lot of space for experimentation to the cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera. It is still an original gem of Czech cinema of the 1960s, which infuriated the communist officials of the time.

Paul, a ships's mechanic on a cargo boat, goes ashore one day in Lisbon and makes the acquaintance of loneliness, of keeping silence, and of Rosa, a barmaid. A three-sided relationship develops between Paul, Rosa and Elisa, Paul's wife, who lives in a town on the Rhine. All of Pauls' money is stolen, he follows the tracks of the thief and gets stabbed. Nevertheless, an in spite of Rosa's departure and the distance that separates him from Elisa, Paul gradually recovers.

Late at night, the psychologist Eliane Hess is called to the hospital to take care of Yves, an eight-year-old boy, who just has lost his parents and siblings in a car accident. Eliane is both shocked and curiously drawn to the traumatized boy. As time goes by, she loses the professional distance to the patient, and when Yves' relatives begin a heavy dispute about the boy's future, Eliane makes an unorthodox decision, that throws her life off track.

This documentary portrays one of the most important museums in the world, Vienna’s Museum of Art History. An extensive look behind the scenes at this fascinating institution employs a number of charismatic protagonists and the varied routine there to show us the museum’s special world.

The war in Congo has caused more than six million deaths over the last twenty years. The population is suffering, but the offenders stay with impunity. Many people see this conflict as one of globalisation's crucial econimic distribution battles because the country has major deposits of many high-tech raw materials. Milo Rau, one of Europe's most acclaimed theatre directors, succeeds in gathering victims, perpetrators, observes and analysts of the conflict for a unique civil tribunal in eastern Congo. The documentary film brings these spectacular court trials to life on the big screen and creates an unvarnished portrait of the largest and bloodiest economic wars in human history.

Matthias is the illegitimate son of a factory worker. He lives as an indentured child labourer at his dictatorial aunt’s remote guesthouse. The only thing he knows in life are hard work and hard punches. After a sudden death in the family, the unhappy boy finds the opportunity to make his way to his mother. This 1941 literary adaptation is an almost forgotten jewel of Swiss film history that offers an impressive insight into Eastern Switzerland’s embroidery industry.

1956. During a visit to a cinema in West Berlin, East German high school pupils Theo and Kurt see disturbing newsreel footage of the uprising in Budapest. Back in Stalinstadt, one of the GDR’s flagship workers’ settlements, they have the idea of holding a minute’s silence in class for the victims of the Hungarian struggle for freedom. Neither the boys, nor their parents, nor the school’s administration are prepared for the minor and major reactions that their expression of solidarity unleashes. The school principal tries to dismiss the incident as juvenile mischief and deal with it internally, but the pupils find themselves snared in the political machinery of a state determined to make an example of them. Condemning their act as counter-revolutionary, the education minister demands that the pupils name their ringleader. They are faced with a decision that has dramatic consequences for their future. Director and screenwriter Lars Kraume has cast up-and-coming actors in the leading roles and established actors in supporting roles for his adaptation of Dietrich Garstka’s eponymous book in which Garstka recounts his own personal experiences and those of his 18 classmates. A moving chapter in German post-war history.

David, a young filmmaker, follows his idol, David Lynch, into the world of Transcendental Meditation (TM). He traces the footsteps of the founder of the movement, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to whom even the Beatles at one time had made the pilgrimage. The Indian guru developed TM into one of the largest esoteric organisations in the world that, with their study programs, promises world peace and yogic flying.

A smokestack stubbornly pierces the sky. Trains rumble by down below. Lights come on in the buildings as night falls. There is a man behind the camera, looking for an image – of himself? Of the world? Of society? By day and night, in rain and snow, he stands filming at the window of his studio. Periodically we hear people leaving messages on his answering machine. They talk about the weather while on vacation and congratulate him on his birthday. His father dies, a child is born, the young family begins to fall apart. Time passes. Slowly the cityscape morphs into the inner landscape of the man behind the camera.

A heavy-metal-loving teenager’s holiday plans fall through at the last minute, meaning he must spend the summer with the person who annoys him most: his mum. The comic actor Simon Bird makes a fine directorial debut with a tender portrait of the relationship between a prickly teenager and his mother over one summer. Beautifully played by Monica Dolan and Earl Cave (son of Nick), the two veer from loathing to love and back again as they both struggle to identify how their lives will move forward. Gentle, wry and affectionate, it marks Bird out as an idiosyncratic new UK voice.

At the far end of Alaska, filmmaker Roman Droux fulfils a dream and travels to the land of grizzly bears together with bear researcher David Bittner. The two adventurers set off for the realm of the bears to a place where there is no trace of human civilization. Surrounded by crystal-clear torrents, they experience the care of a mother bear and impressive battles of giant male bears. Roman Droux brings pictures of breathtaking beauty to the big screen. A lively nature film for the whole family.

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.

In this interesting World War I drama, Bruno Ganz gives a compelling performance as Jakob, an obsessive inventor who lives in a Swiss village. He receives unconditional support from his friend Otti (Walo Luond), but that is about all; the other villagers do not tolerate Jakob's eccentricities very well, and regard him as a crackpot. He perserveres in spite of this obstacle and finally invents a viable carriage that does not run on wheels but on a tread. Unfortunately for Jakob, the military have already come up with the same invention: the tank. The discovery finally breaks him, and he is quickly shuttled off to an asylum.

In this Swiss film noir a private investigator stumbles onto a case involving blackmail and an oversexed, under-aged girl. He finds the girl, and, tragically, becomes involved with her.

Emil has fallen in love with Larissa. But before the two can really get to know one another, Larissa dies unexpectedly. And Emil, who only wants to obscure the sad truth about Larissa’s death, is mistaken for her former boyfriend. Larissa’s family takes a sincere liking to Emil; her sister Nora even begins to take an interest in the young man who had apparently been with Larissa during the last weeks of her life. Emil is suddenly needed and finds he is able to console Larissa’s family. But the closer his relationship with Nora becomes, all the more difficult it becomes for Emil to live with his fabricated past.

The Swiss National Association for the Storage of Radioactive Waste plans to build a permanent waste disposal site in Wellenberg, Canton of Nidwalden. A regional citizens’ action group is formed to protest against it. Murer not only interviews supporters and opponents, in particular the Alpine farmers living on the Wellenberg. He starts by raising the question of a time-scale that is out of all proportion to the human lifespan as a measure of time. Fredi Murer dedicated the film to the “children and children’s children”, both of the farmers on the Wellenberg and of all of us. For the first time, Murer deals explicitly with the ‘can-do’ generation that lives and works as though they were the last people on this earth.

Jonas Widmer is one of the best long-distance runners in Switzerland, his big goal is the Olympic marathon. Despite his difficult childhood, he seems to have found his way: Apart from his passion for sports, he works as a cook and is about to move in with this girlfriend. But then Jonas fails to defend his title at his home race and is increasingly caught up in the memories of his late brother Philipp. Unable to put the inner pressure of suffering into words, Jonas develops a tragic double life in his growing desperation. The Zurich director Hannes Baumgartner was inspired by a true Swiss criminal case for his first feature film. DER LÄUFER creates a differentiated image of an ambivalent figure entangled in a densely woven web of formative experiences, processes of repression and inner conflict.

The story of the man who brought high-ranking German Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann to justice.

Suffering and dying do not stop even at the most powerful, even absolute ones: The Sun King Louis XIV - a parade role for the Truffaut icon Jean-Pierre Léaud - suddenly feels pain in his leg after a walk in August 1715. He spent the next few days in his chamber, continuing government business in the best possible way and gradually gliding towards his death. A historical film as a chamber play.

Max is an orphan who has been hired out to a farmer’s family. His foster parents treat him like a workhorse while their son seizes every opportunity to humiliate him. Playing the accordion is the one thing that is entirely his. But when the new teacher stands up for Max, it only makes a bad situation much worse. The only thing preserving his will to survive is his friendship with Berteli, who was also taken on to work at the farm. Max dreams of Argentina with her: a fantasy world, where allegedly even hayforks are made of silver.

The newly-wed Antoine climbs an alp with the elderly Séraphin. A few weeks later a terrible landslide takes people and animals to their death. There are no survivors. The few who have escaped the disaster inform the village. Thérèse, Antoine's young wife, is pregnant. It's difficult for her to see her pregnancy through and adjust to her role as a young widow. Two months later, Antoine manages to free himself from the rubble. The villagers think he's a ghost. Finally they come to accept the fact he is alive. But he cannot accept the fact he is the only survivor. He returns to the mountain, convinced that Séraphin is still alive. At dawn, Thérèse discovers his disappearance. She wants to look for him among the debris, in order to “snatch from the dead something still alive”.

Liège, Belgium. Sandra is a factory worker who discovers that her workmates have opted for a EUR1,000 bonus in exchange for her dismissal. She has only a weekend to convince her colleagues to give up their bonuses in order to keep her job.

Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2015 for this daring, genre-bending portrait of three Sri Lankan refugees—Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan), and Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby)— who form a fake family unit to emigrate. When they find themselves living together in a violent, gang-dominated housing project outside Paris, they start to reevaluate the terms of their intimacy. Like his character, the actor and novelist Jesuthasan was a member of the militant nationalist army LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) before fleeing the country and settling into a series of odd jobs in Paris, while eventually renouncing all ties to the Tigers. When, in its bloody last act, his character has to fall back on his military training, Dheepan becomes something darker: a harrowing reckoning with the past.

The surviver of the Fassbinder family meet on Potsdamer Platz for the shooting of the Last New German Film – a remake of Pasolini’s THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM. Chaos total: Director Schlingensief, degraded to a set manager, will be replaced by an unknown, who get’s the Bundesfilmpreis award. Film as a nightmare – or vice versa. Producer Volker Spengler sends an agent (Christoph Schlingensief) to Hollywood where he meets Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad and Roland Emmerich on a mission to raise money and get ex-Visconti superstar Helmut Berger to appear in the film. Depicting a German cultural scene at the turn of the century that still has not come to terms with the legacy of New German Cinema, Schlingensief tackles the topic once and for all: with endless references both open and obscure, Schlingensief takes the process of de- and reconstruction just far enough to both completely demystify and pay tribute to an era and its heritage. With appearances from the German film, TV and theatre scene, many actors, contributors and cultural icons appear as themselves; but Schlingensief is not afraid to resurrect some of the dead, only to kill them off again: part parody, part heartfelt homage, THE 120 DAYS OF BOTTROP gives New German Cinema its final coup de grâce.

Gottfried Böhm is considered to be one of Germany’s most important architects. The Pritzker prize-winning father learned his trade from his father. At the age of 94, Gottfried still works every day on construction projects with his sons, Stephan, Peter and Paul, who are also architects. But then the family loses its emotional centre: Elisabeth – who was also an architect – wife, mother and their most important source of inspiration. Gottfried Böhm embarks on a journey to the significant buildings and milestones in his life.

Since the death of her husband, Martha, 80-year-old, has lost her zest for life. In her village in the Emmental, especially her friends Lisi, Hanni and Frieda are concerned about her. After discussion, they decide to help her realise a long-held dream: to open a lingerie boutique. The news causes consternation in the little town of Trub.

At the beginning of the 1970s: Who are the people who practice the dying craft of home posing in Baselbiet? And what problems do they have to contend with? Exciting and moving picture of social and economic contexts and dependencies and living monument of a once flourishing craft. A milestone of Swiss documentary filmmaking

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.

Up until the middle of the 19Th century, poverty stricken mountain farmers from the Ticino area of Switzerland frequently sold their children to Milan as chimney sweeps or spazzacamini. That is also young Giorgios fate. He is forced to climb through pitch black chimneys, flinging down the soot with his bare hands. But he does not lose heart. Together with his buddies sharing in the same misery, he establishes the association of Black Brothers. They stick together, struggling against their penury and getting involved in fights with the street gangs of Milan. The film tells of the gripping adventures of the chimney sweep boys and their spectacular escape back to their native land.

A small theater troupe is stranded in Switzerland after World War II: the artists hope to get a visa to South America. But to get it, they first have to pay off debts to the Swiss government – and perform an operetta. Swiss cinema classic, based on one of the most successful Swiss stage plays of the time.

The internet has changed everything, also for journalism: business models are falling by the wayside, news is available for free, anywhere and at any time. I accompany journalists in their daily lives, see how they struggle, and I do what they also do: I observe and ask, also question myself, my fascination and my suspicion. I, too, use the net with ease. I am a user – and I am used.

Alphonse lives as a recluse on an Alp. Mother Nature provides him with everything he needs, and being able to live in the present is a gift for him. Monika’s attitude towards time has become serene since her near-death experience. She no longer has a fear of death, which is also sensed by the dementia patients she treats. Sam, a forester, sees the deceased. In his opinion, death only occurs on a physical level. For the Capuchin monks in Schwyz, death and dying are part of everyday life, also for Eugen, a monk and artist in Engelberg who has administered terminal care for more than thirty fellow brothers.

This documentary from director Asif Kapadia highlights one of the most celebrated and controversial soccer players in the world. The charismatic Argentine was worshiped on and off the pitch and led Napoli to its first league title. This wild and unforgettable story will recount the miracles he performed on the field as darker days loomed ahead.

In a remote village nestled in the foggy hills of northern Bangladesh, Rupa fights against a predetermined destiny. With only a bike, a camera and her knowledge, she defies traditions and tries to make a place for herself in her community. When a twist of fate hits her family, Rupa’s freedom is threatened. Will she be able to maintain the fragile balance between the expectations of her loved ones and her own dreams?

17-year-old Edith is partying at her friend's house in Zurich and is dragged to a nightclub by the unscrupulous seducer Jean, who gets her drunk and abuses her. When she becomes pregnant, she asks her father, who is a gynecologist, to perform an abortion. He refuses at first, but eventually performs the procedure - with fatal consequences.

Daniele von Arb was 16 years old in 1970 when he and his friends founded the revolutionary cell in Zurich later listed by the U.S. secret service CIA in its chart on international terrorism under the code name “Annebäbi”. Today he is a fortune-teller and future consultant. A hurtling journey through the armed struggle of the 1970s, entry into the cosmos of spirituality and finally, in 1989, a first class ticket to freedom.

Marcello, a small and gentle dog groomer, finds himself involved in a dangerous relationship of subjugation with Simone, a former violent boxer who terrorises the entire neighbourhood. In an effort to reaffirm his dignity, Marcello will submit to an unexpected act of vengeance.

The murder of a judge reopens old political wounds between Italy and France and stirs up memories of the Years of Lead. Following the murder of a university professor in a terrorist ambush, Marco - former militant of the extreme left sentenced to life imprisonment and refuge in France thanks to Mitterrand doctrine - is accused by the Italian State to be one of the 'brains' the attack and it is sought extradition. It begins, as well, the long breakaway of Mark, with his daughter Violet, which quickly turned into a media war of letters and interviews. The arrogance of Mark, which leads him to defend at all costs, will drag in the mud all his family remained in Italy - his sister Anna, Italian teacher in a high school "good" Bologna, the brother Riccardo, criminal court on the rise, Bianca, their 10 year old daughter and mother Teresa. All innocent, will gather to pay for past sins of Mark without understanding why.

When her mother decides to stop administering medication to her mentally challenged daughter, 18-year-old Dora awakes, as if from a deep sleep. Dora discovers her body, her sensuality and finally, sex, too. Her parents are shocked by Dora’s sudden unbridled lust for life and, when she gets involved with a man she meets at her market stall vendor job, they are furious. Seeing her relationship as unscrupulous and abusive, they demand their daughter stops seeing her lover. But their efforts are to no avail and, when Dora’s affair leads to a more serious situation, everyone has to reassess the limits of their relationship to each other, and reconsider such topics as self-determination, trust and jealousy. Courageous, necessary and sensitive – Stina Werenfels’ adaptation of Lukas Bärfuss’s stage play is a fearless and moving drama about letting go. The tender, subjective shots that capture the beauty of the world as Dora sees it are as much a part of the film’s success as is the portrait of a desperate mother, having to cope with life’s pitfalls

Alain is in his 40s and runs a famous publishing house which publishes novels by his friend Léonard, a bohemian writer. Alain's wife, Selena, is the star of a popular TV series and Léonard's companion, Valérie, is the devoted assistant of a political figure. Although they are longtime friends, Alain is about to turn down Léonard's new manuscript, complicating the relationship between the two couples.

Ilona Koponen (Kati Outinen), a head waitress at Dubrovnik restaurant, is married to Lauri (Kari Väänänen), a tram driver. The couple live in a small, modestly furnished apartment in Helsinki. As they both come home from work late one night, Lauri surprises Ilona with a new television which he purchased on store credit. There is a short discussion between the two regarding their ability to meet their financial obligations but they agree that the TV payments are manageable. Next day, as Lauri gets to work, he learns that the company will be laying off several workers due to non-profitability of certain tram routes and he is randomly chosen as one of the workers to be laid off. The day after Lauri has finished working his last scheduled shift Ilona is informed by the owner of Dubrovnik that the restaurant is being sold to a chain restaurant company and all the employees will be let go since the new company will be bringing in its own employees. Both of them set out looking for work immediately but with discouraging results. Lauri gets offered a job as a bus driver but is unable to pass the medical exam and subsequently loses his professional driver's licence. Ilona gets a job at a rundown bar/restaurant which doesn't even have a name and is owned by a tax evading crook. After 6 weeks of working there, the restaurant gets shut down by the state and Ilona does not get paid by the dishonest owner. During their search for meaningful employment, both Lauri and Ilona enter bouts of heavy-drinking, all the while running into their former co-workers who are dealing with similar difficulties. At one point, the two even sell their car and take the money to a casino in hopes of doubling the money but they, however, end up losing it all. Most of their furniture as well as the new TV that Lauri bought is repossessed by the creditors. One day, Ilona accidentally runs into Mrs Sjöholm (Elina Salo), her former boss. Sjöholm suggests that Ilona should open up a restaurant. Since Ilona does not have the financial means needed for such a venture, Sjöholm agrees to provide the capital for the restaurant to start operating with the understanding that Ilona will pay back the loan to Mrs Sjöholm. Ilona, humbled by her recent experiences, is initially reluctant to accept the offer for fear of the restaurant failing and her not being able to repay Mrs Sjöholm. She eventually does agree. Ilona names the restaurant Work and hires some of the staff from Dubrovnik, including the troubled chef Lajunen (Markku Peltola), plus Lauri. Filled with anxiety during a slow lunch hour on opening day, Ilona's worries quickly disappear as she watches the restaurant fill to capacity later the same afternoon. After receiving a call from a Helsinki union asking for a reservation for 30 people, Lauri and Ilona exit the restaurant and stand on the front steps appearing emotionless and looking at the skies as more people enter the restaurant.

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.

Shortly before the end of World War II, the SS leadership wanted to blow up the Simplon Tunnel. The Swiss secret service contacted Italian resistance fighters: On April 22, 1945, they set fire to 64 tons of explosives - and thereby saved the tunnel. A Swiss trainman and a Catholic priest also played an important role. A contemporary document with eyewitnesses and archive material about one of the most dangerous resistance actions on the Swiss border.

Capricious Summer is a Czechoslovak comedy directed by Jiří Menzel. It is based on the novel Rozmarné léto (Summer of Caprice) by the Czech writer Vladislav Vančura. It was listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was cancelled due to the events of May 1968 in France. The film depicts a humorous story of three men, a colonel, a priest and a bath-keeper, during rainy summer days.

A co-operative that was founded in 1993 in Ticino (the Alpine southernmost Canton of Switzerland) by Ulrich Stamani and 12 other people continues to prosper as a small farm and eco-resort thanks to the help and support of people like Katharina Luthi, a skilled farmer. Over the course of a year the co-operative has to readjust itself to the needs of its members and try to find new younger people to progress the simple life it preserves.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is arguably the world's most reknowned expert on the process of dying. With Kübler Ross' full collaboration, Haupt's film looks back on her life and career, from her earliest days as a triplet in 1920s Zurich, to her fame as an international lecturer and writer based in the US. Now in her twilight years, Kübler-Ross is bedbound in Arizona, and awaiting death herself. A truly fascinating film that enables us to re-evaluate our own emotions regarding life's greatest certainty, death. With the addition of archive film and interviews with Kübler-Ross' sisters and close colleagues, Haupt builds up a rich picture of a remarkable woman who has done so much to make death less of a taboo.

A runaway couple go on an unforgettable journey from Boston to Key West, recapturing their passion for life and their love for each other on a road trip that provides revelation and surprise right up to the very end.

Teo has a good job, a fiancee, a lovers, no intention to assume any responsibility in his life. The meeting with Emma, a blind woman, will upset his convictions.

Montreal, 1963. 13-year-old Hanna has to deal with growing up and with her family: Her father is trying unsuccessfully to make a living as a writer, her mother is constantly overworked. Hanna takes refuge in Godard's cinema and in her film idol Anna Karina - only to discover, like Karina in «Vivre sa vie», that although she is free, she is above all responsible for living her life. Sensitive and poetic coming-of-age and coming-out story with subtle overtones.

Detective Yvonne is the widow of police chief Santi, a local hero in a town on the French Riviera. When she learns he was in fact a crooked cop, she tries to right his wrongs. Crossing paths with Antoine, a victim of Santi, sets off a series of wild events.

Set wholly in a secondary school in a working-class district of Paris, where many inhabitants are foreign-born, the film follows a year in the life of a young teacher, François Marin, and the 25 teenage pupils to whom he teaches French for an hour each day. Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he spends a year with his racially mixed students walking the narrow line between maintaining discipline and gaining co-operation. Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, master French director Laurent Cantet's The Class is a "fresh piece of humanist, realist, optimist cinema" (The Guardian).

What do you dream of when you're 16-years-old and in a seaside resort in Normandy in the 1980s? A best friend? A lifelong teen pact? Scooting off on adventures on a boat or a motorbike? Living life at breakneck speed? No. You dream of death. Because you can't get a bigger kick than dying. And that's why you save it till the very end. The summer holidays are just beginning, and this story recounts how Alexis grew into himself.

Eternity And A Day traces the final days of Alexandre (Bruno Ganz), a celebrated Greek writer as he prepares to leave his seaside home forever. While packing, he finds a letter from his long-dead wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), who wrote about an enchanted summer day they spent thirty years ago. From that point, Alexandre embarks on a mystical journey through his past and present. Realizing that after spending his entire life chasing after the words of poems and novels, Alexandre wants one final chance to capture the lost precious moments of true happiness, even if only for one day.

Laura (Penélope Cruz) and her children travel from Buenos Aires to the small Spanish village where she was born to attend her sister's wedding. Unexpected events soon lead to a crisis that exposes the family's hidden past. Suspicions mount, loved ones begin to turn on one another, and dark secrets long hidden threaten to come to light, revealing shocking truths. This gripping thriller from Oscar-winning filmmaker Asghar Farhadi also stars Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darín.

Pensioner Roli comes to Fareed’s assistance when the Syrian refugee is faced with the burial of his Muslim wife. Together they stumble into a bewildering forest of Swiss bureaucracy to which Roli finds a beautifully simple answer.

Three players in the free market take on ethical responsibility for their actions and the following generations: they engage in sustainable production. At various stages, the film charts the careers of successful entrepreneurs who operate locally, nationally and internationally and manage to combine both the market and morality. The film examines the question of what a neo-liberal economic model could look like and presents the positions of three pioneers, who, day in and day out, balance out fair working conditions, biological production and the cost pressures of the free economy. The film presents a motivating approach to solving a situation which often appears hopeless. It emphasizes ethics and sustainability as factors for success.

The sweltering summer heat beats down on a sterile residential estate in the suburbs of Rome. Many a family lives here that no longer belongs anywhere. There is a mysterious sense of unease that can explode at any moment. Parents are constantly frustrated because they are not from a better suburb, and the kind of middle-class life they had hoped for is beyond their reach. But their children are the real protagonists of the shock wave that propels the entire estate towards collapse. An almost atavistic rage glimmers in the relationships and events portrayed in the directors' rigorous mise-en-scène. An unreliable narrator guides us, sweetly and sarcastically, through this dark fairy tale. A story about women and men who see their hopes and dreams falling by the wayside all too soon

Five courageous, clever and self-determined women are at the centre of Barbara Miller's documentary #FEMALE PLEASURE. They break the taboo of silence and shame imposed on them by society or their religious communities with their archaic patriarchal structures. Deborah Feldman, Leyla Hussein, Rokudenashiko, Doris Wagner and Vithika Yadav are committed to the sexual enlightenment and self-determination of all women, beyond all social and religious norms and barriers, with incredible positive energy and strength. For this they pay a high price - they are publicly defamed, persecuted and threatened, they are rejected by their former environment and even threatened with death by religious leaders and fanatical believers.

In the “Kunstgiesserei” in St. Gallen renowned artists – such as Urs Fischer, Katharina Fritsch, Peter Fischli, Mariana Castillio Deball, Paul McCarthy, Alex Hanimann and Hans Josephsohn – meet up with Felix Lehner, the charismatic founder of the art foundry. He and his crew translate ideas into sculptures with a great deal of passion and enthusiasm. Their success has led to the fact that some of the production phases had to be outsourced to Shanghai. The cultural and artisanal exchange with China is tremendously enriching. And regardless of whether in Shanghai or St. Gallen, the molten metal is spellbinding as it turns dreams into reality.

Cairo, a city of more than 20 million people, has recently gone through multiple political, cultural and economic upheavals, forcing Egyptian society to reinvent itself. In Egypt, people don't live on their own and it's only after they get married that they can leave their parent's home to create their own household. Whatever their intimate feelings might be, marriage is an inevitable step towards independence. The film follows the path towards marriage through the eyes of three couples. Instead of presenting marriage as the union of two beings for eternity, FIANCEES uses marriage as a pretext to talk about men and women, and the social pressures young couples face every day. By freeing the intimate and sincere voice of those characters, the film allows us to see the aspirations and fears of today's Egyptian youth.

Vittoria, 10 years old, lives with her mother in Sardinia. The two share a symbiotic relationship, but then Vittoria meets Angelica, a wild and disoriented young woman. Attracted to this strange woman, Vittoria spends more and more time with her behind her mother's back until she finally learns the truth: Angelica is her biological mother. All three will have to forgive each other, accept each other and finally learn to love each other.

Paris 1964: In Alberto Giacometti's studio people work, drink, doubt, argue, flirt and laugh. The Swiss is established as an artist, his works achieve record sales on the market. However, he is not interested in success. Giacometti asks the writer and art lover James Lord to model for him. Flattered and fascinated, he says yes. But Lord has no idea what he is getting into. Soon the young American gains insights into the fascinating, intensive, sometimes chaotic and irritating creative process of the world-famous artist...

When Amador Coro gets out of prison for having provoked a fire, nobody is waiting for him. He returns to his home town, a small village hidden in the mountains of rural Galicia, to live with his elder mother, Benedicta, and three cows. Life goes on calmly, following the rhythm of the nature. Until the night when a fire devastates the region. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival,where it won the Jury Prize.

A volunteer fire department throws a party for their former boss with the whole town invited, but nothing goes as planned.

Recounted mostly through animation to protect his identity, Amin looks back over his past as a child refugee from Afghanistan as he grapples with a secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years. A thrilling documentary made with a blend of animation and archive footage tells an immensely powerful tale of a gay Afghan survivor and his need to confront his past in order to truly have a future. Amin arrived as an unaccompanied minor in Denmark from Afghanistan. Today, at 36, he is a successful academic and is getting married to his long-time boyfriend. A secret he has been hiding for over 20 years threatens to ruin the life he has built for himself. For the first time he is sharing his story with his close friend. FLEE weaves together a stunning tapestry of images and memories to tell the deeply affecting and original story of a young man grappling with his traumatic past in order to find his true self and the meaning of home.

The documentary enters the heart of football culture and uses the dressing room as the central stage. By putting on their jerseys, professionals, women, juniors and seniors take on different roles for the duration of a game. The joy of the game unites them all. The film shows the National League A women's team from GC Zurich, SC Kriens from the Challenge League, the C-juniors of FC Blue Stars Zurich and the veteran team of FC Wettswil-Bonstetten in the dressing room. A unity is created from single individuals. By putting on the football jersey, each and every one of them is given their task. Everyone faces the pressure of the game, but also their own fear. The film shows how teams come together, forget everyday life and become part of a greater unity through the ritual of football.

Fortuna (14), a young Ethiopian teenage girl, has had no news of her parents since arriving in Lampedusa, Italy. Together with other refugees, she is given shelter for the winter in a Swiss catholic hospice at an altitude of over 2000 meters. While they wait for their fate to be decided by the Swiss authorities, Fortuna meets Kabir, a 26-year-old African refugee, and falls desperately in love. Their relationship develops in secret, till the day Kabir disappears. - Bruno Ganz as Brother Jean.

A large private television channel has just been established in Switzerland. A communications company is given the task of drawing up concepts for programmes and decides to buy the rights for the stories of various criminals from which to produce films. Rosemonde decides to sell her story. Eight years ago, she killed a man who tried to violate her. As there were no witnesses, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Kevin, a film producer, charges Paul, a young writer, with the task of writing the scenario relating Rosemonde's life at the time. However, she appears to be incapable of recalling her past and clams up when Paul approaches her with the questions he needs to ask her. Marie, a young actress, is then asked to visit Rosemonde and in exchange is promised the role in the film if she can make her talk. The film relates the strange relationship between the two women who begin to develop a friendship

«Francofonia» by Alexander Sokurow is the story of two remarkable men, Louvre director Jacques Jaujard and Nazi Occupation officer Count Wolff-Metternich - enemies then collaborators - whose alliance would be the driving force behind the preservation of museum treasures. «Francofonia» explores the relationship between art and power, the Louvre museum as a living example of civilization, and what art tells us about ourselves even in the midst of one of the bloodiest conflicts the world has ever seen.

The day after the night of the full moon, 12 children all 10 years of age are found to be missing in the four language regions of Switzerland. The police and the media reassuringly claim that there are plenty of leads and clues. No kidnapper comes forward to contradict them. At the end of one week, all the parents receive the exact same letter from the children, written in cryptic language. By the next full moon they must have deciphered the letter and complied with all its requirements, or else… A dramatic-ironic tale that reveals the current state of Switzerland. Switzerland as a metaphor. Or: a plea for less logic and more imagination in our world.

Situated some 200km off Italy's southern coast, Lampedusa has hit world headlines in recent years as the first port of call for hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern migrants hoping to make a new life in Europe. Rosi spent months living on the Mediterranean island, capturing its history, culture and the current everyday reality of its 6,000-strong local population as hundreds of migrants land on its shores on a weekly basis. The resulting documentary focuses on 12-year-old Samuele, a local boy who loves to hunt with his slingshot and spend time on land even though he hails from a culture steeped in the sea.

Welcome to the prime of life. All his life, Rudy has worked hard for the firm, and for the family. But now, everything is about to change: Rudy retires. No alarm clock, no meetings, no travels to distant countries to set the pace. Shopping, cooking, gardening, and the daily routines of marital bliss will now fill his schedule. Rudy was actually looking forward to it, to the next phase. But as he soon realises, the prime of life is a wild ride on an emotional rollercoaster. Retirement is not for cowards.

Stéphane, a young French man from Paris, travels to Romania. He is looking for the singer Nora Luca, whom his father had heard all the time before his death. Wandering along a frozen road, he meets old Izidor, a member of the Roma and tells him of Nora Luca. Izidor seems to understand and takes him to his village. Stéphane believes that Izidor will take him to Nora Luca when the time has come. So, he lives in the Roma village for several months.

Yuri, 16, has lived all his life in Gagarin Towers, a vast red-brick housing project on the outskirts of Paris. He dreams of becoming an astronaut. When plans to demolish Gagarin Towers leak out, Yuri joins the resistance. With his friends Diana and Houssam, he embarks on a mission to save their home, which has become his “starship.”

In 1976 a massive explosion at chemicals factory Icmesa in the Italian Seveso had devastating consequences for neighbouring communities and their environment. Icmesa’s parent company was Givaudan, which in turn belonged to Hoffman La Roche, based in Basel. Following the accident, Icmesa’s technical director Jorg Sambeth was charged with failing to keep adequate security measures. During his investigations into the true cause and background to the catastrophe, Sambeth stumbled upon facts that were damaging to those who were paying his lawyers. Yet he is sentenced to five years in prison. How should he take up his grievances with this conglomerate of companies?

Filmmaker and anthropologist Céline Pernet questions her relationship with the men of her generation. Responding to an advert, men aged 30 to 45 years old answer her questions, in a quest as personal as it is societal. The film casts an amused and caring eye, reflecting an urgent need to discuss current models of masculinity.

A poetic journey through time to the history of the legendary "Grand Hotel Brissago".

One of the world’s greatest living painters, the German artist Gerhard Richter has spent over half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises and mass media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. Infamously media-shy, he agreed to appear on camera for the first time in 15 years for a 2007 short by filmmaker Corinna Belz called Gerhard Richter’s Window. Her follow-up, Gerhard Richter Painting, is exactly that: a thrilling document of Richter’s creative process, juxtaposed with intimate conversations (with his critics, his collaborators, and his American gallerist Marian Goodman) and rare archive material. From our fly-on-the-wall perspective, we watch the 79-year-old create a series of large-scale abstract canvasses, using fat brushes and a massive squeegee to apply (and then scrape off) layer after layer of brightly colored paint. This mesmerizing footage, of a highly charged process of creation and destruction, turns Belz’s portrait of an artist into a work of art itself.

Franz is by far the smallest in the class, has blond ringlets and gets a high-pitched squeaky voice when he gets upset. Luckily, two best friends help: Gabi and Eberhard. When Franz discovers Hank Haberer's "10 rules for a real man" for himself one day, turbulence is inevitable and the friendship of the three gets into trouble.

Artist, anarchist, drop-out, sans papiers: Giovanni Segantini was all of this. He created, usually under the open sky, monumental works in the idealised image of nature of an alpine landscape. In the course of his lifetime he climbed ever higher in quest of more light. He died at the age of 41 in an alpine hut at 2700m in the Engadine. The film provides insight into his difficult childhood and boyhood, shares his inner processes and crises as a painter, as well as his contradictory dealings with motherly love and eroticism – and ultimately his desperate struggle against death.

Determined 15-year-old Lara is committed to becoming a professional ballerina. With the support of her father, she throws herself into this quest for the absolute at a new school. Lara's adolescent frustrations and impatience are heightened as she realizes her body does not bend so easily to the strict discipline because she was born a bo

The story of Italy, from the 80s to nowadays, told through the life of four friends, Giulio, Gemma, Paolo e Riccardo; during 40 years of loves, aspirations, success and failures.

Rock musician Benji leads a charmed life until the day the evil Maestro steals his shadow in order to take possession of Benji's musical talent. At first, Benji loses the ability to play, then he slowly becomes invisible. Desperate to help his friend, Globi follows the Maestro to his old “Opera house” and discovers that the villain has been stealing the shadows of all the gifted musicians, so that he may rule the world of music. With Globi's help, Benji and his musical partner Lucinda set out to regain their stolen shadows. Will the three of them be able to conquer the evil Maestro and save Benji's life?

Tell them you’re 24’, advises Petrunya’s mother as her daughter heads off to another interview. But Petrunya is 31; moreover, she has studied history, a subject that no one in Macedonia seems to need. So there she sits in front of her potential employer, a factory owner, who looks down on her floral dress and refuses to take her seriously. On her way home - naturally, she did not get the job - Petrunya decides to take the plunge. It is Epiphany and, like every year, the young men of the city are diving for the holy cross that the priest has thrown into the icy river. This time, Petrunya is quicker than everyone else and ends up holding the trophy aloft for the TV cameras. For one whole day and one night, she will defend the cross, accompanied by much public commotion and against the closed ranks of the male world. Teona Strugar Mitevska delivers an angry yet melancholic satire that questions the status of democratic change in Macedonian society and passes scathing judgement on representatives of the church, the judiciary and the media. The film’s sympathies are all with the determined woman who asserts herself against archaic traditions and paralysing opportunism.

Spring. Yorkshire. Young farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker for lambing season ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path.

"Gomorra" is a contemporary Neapolitan mob drama that exposes Italy's criminal underbelly by telling five stories of individuals who think they can make their own compact with Camorra, the area's Mafia.

Follows late screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, as he researches the painter Goya in a trip filled with culture, cinema, emotion, painting and Spain.

Alexandre lives in Lyon with his wife and children. One day, he discovered by chance that the priest who abused him to scouts always officiates with children. He then starts a fight, quickly joined by François and Emmanuel, also victims of the priest, to "release their word" on what they suffered.

Romeo Aldea, a physician living in a small mountain town in Transylvania, has raised his daughter Eliza with the idea that once she turns 18, she will leave to study and live abroad. His plan is close to succeeding. Eliza has won a scholarship to study psychology in the UK. She just has to pass her final exams – a formality for such a good student. On the day before her first written exam, Eliza is assaulted in an attack that could jeopardize her entire future. Now Romeo has to make a decision. There are ways of solving the situation, but none of them using the principles he, as a father, has taught his daughter.

"Grauzone" is the film by Fredi M. Murer that anticipated the 1980s movement in 1978. A mysterious epidemic haunts Switzerland. The symptoms: a sudden urge to go outside, sudden melancholy, general sensitization. An unintentionally published advertisement informs about the wave of illness and triggers uncertainty, which also penetrates the uniform suburban idyll of Zurich. Julia and her husband Alfred live here, who, in addition to his work as a commercial employee, leads a double life as an eavesdropping specialist and is increasingly plunged into a crisis of meaning.

In post-war Germany, liberation by the Allies does not mean freedom for everyone. Hans Hoffmann is repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which criminalizes homosexuality. Nevertheless, over the decades, he continues his quest for freedom and love, even if he finds it in the most unusual places.

The demise of airline Swissair in 2001 was a huge blow to Switzerland’s economy and to the country’s morale. It was a sad day for Swiss history when the airline’s fleet was grounded on 2 October 2001. Grounding is set during the last days of the doomed airline, and tells the story of manager Mario A. Corti’s unhappy fate, the last, unlucky CEO at the traditional airline company, as well as of all those nameless people who lost almost everything in the maelstrom of Swissair’s downfall: their job, home and their belief in Switzerland.

86 minutes Finnish “Perhaps Kaurismäki’s most original film and probably his best” (William Fisher), this brilliant refashioning of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set in the cutthroat world of high finance, makes surprising analogies between the rotten state of Denmark then and the corrupt state of Finland in the money-hungry ’80s. This Hamlet’s ineffectual prince (Pirkka-Pekka Petelius) is a chubby, google-eyed electronics buff with a “heart as warm as a refrigerator,” who schemes and conspires to sell his father’s shipbuilding business so that he can corner the market on rubber ducks; Polonius is a property manager, Laertes a marketing man, and Ophelia (Kati Outinen, natch) an infatuated, suicidal wannabe. “Confidently post-Fassbinder in its noir-ish angles and deadpan cool” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice), Hamlet Goes Business is gorgeously shot in stylish black and white, but as Kaurismäki himself warns, “Don’t be fooled by the plastic beauty of this movie: the question is about money — a matter of life and death.”

Four young people with physical disabilities try to overcome their isolation and the difficulties of living together. In a vacation home, they talk openly with people with and without disabilities about the challenges they face in relationships and sexuality.

A coolly observed study of familial dysfunction, Michael Haneke’s follow-up to Amour has all of the stylistic traits we have come to expect: the cut-glass precision, scenes shot to resemble static surveillance footage, significant action taking place in the margins of long shots, and the presence of Isabelle Huppert. Thematically the film revisits Haneke’s concerns with bourgeois complacency and guilt, racial prejudice and our changing relationship to technology. Moments of comedy introduce a surprising and welcome new element to the director’s winning formula.

Läppli is arrested as a supposed opponent of the army and misses the general mobilisation. Eventually he arrives at the barracks after all. There, as HD Läppli, he drives every superior mad in record time with his obtuseness and sense of justice.

The everyday life of midwives unfolds on the threshold where new life is born and life may fade away. The film shows how midwives support couples during pregnancy and birth. It lets us participate in the balancing act between a safe and a perfect birth. The film provides an insight into a mystery that is considered both a miracle and a high-risk medical undertaking.

A model family's happy life unexpectedly goes off the rails when the carefree Hedi suddenly starts having panic attacks. First mental illness and then drug dependency – the happiness that these happy-go-lucky thirty-somethings once took for granted suddenly seems unattainable, and their world fragile and uncertain.

Heidi (Elsbeth Sigmund), a young orphan girl living with her aunt (Elsie Attenhofer) in Frankfurt, is forced to move to the Swiss Alps to live with her ornery grandfather (Heinrich Gretler). At first, he resents her presence, but, after a short while, Heidi manages to pierce his gruff exterior, and the two become close. She also befriends a young shepherd named Peter (Thomas Klameth). After three years, Heidi's aunt arrives and demands Heidi's return to Frankfurt.

The second part of the famous story on Heidi. Returning from Frankfurt, she applies her new knowlegdes.

In 2016 the sun has turned the entire world into a scorched and barren wasteland. The humans who have survived are either resourceful or violent, and sometimes both. Marie, her little sister Leonie, and best friend Phillip, are in a car headed to the mountains - rumor has it there is water there. Along the way they meet Tom, a first-rate mechanic. But can they trust him? Fraught with deep distrust, the group is lured into an ambush where their real battle for survival begins.

Where does one feel at home? In Stadtallendorf, a German city with a complex history of both excluding and integrating foreigners, genial teacher Dieter Bachmann offers his pupils the key to at least feeling as if they are at home. Aged between twelve and fourteen, these pupils come from twelve different nations; some have not quite mastered the German language. On the brink of retirement, Bachmann is eager to inspire these citizens-in-the-making with a sense of curiosity for a wide range of crafts, subjects, cultures and opinions. Watching this absorbing, sensitive documentary, one is overwhelmed with the realisation that, if only all children were blessed with such emotionally intelligent, ever-patient educators, conflict would be mitigated via discussion and John Lennon’s “Imagine” could be our reality. Those who, like filmmaker Maria Speth and her cinematographer Reinhold Vorschneider, are able to recognise and highlight so beautifully not only the importance of education but also what a quietly spectacular process it can be, are heroes in their own right, too.

The movie recalls children who suffered mental and physical harm both during the last century, particularly in religious orphanages, and during the time of early modernperiod witch-hunts. It shows that the mindsets and behavioural patterns of both time periods are more alike than one might think.

The film tackles the life journey of Toni Ligabue, visionary naïf painter who used to draw tigers, lions and jaguars while living among the poplar trees of the boundless Po valley. A harsh life that is a fairy tale too, as a lonely and marginalized kid finds redemption in his art, and a way to express himself and be admired by the world.

From the mid-1960s onwards thousands of western hippies and flower children moved to India in search of an alternative lifestyle, spiritual enlightenment and drug experimentation. Most returned after a few months or years, but some stayed forever. Filmmaker Grossenbacher meets some of these lifers, like Cesare, a cave-dwelling Yogi, still striving for spiritual liberation. Swiss Hanspeter runs a small farm in the Himalayas, but judging by the hash pipe permanently wedged between his lips, he is no traditionalist. Then there are the South African twins who get through the day with booze and by sewing hippie clothes for both the old and new generation of Goa freaks.

Hiroshima mon amour concerns a series of conversations or one enormous conversation over a 36-hour long period between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva), referred to as Her, and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada), referred to as Him. They have had a brief relationship and are now separating. The two debate memory and forgetfulness as She prepares to depart, comparing failed relationships with the bombing of Hiroshima and the perspectives of people inside and outside the incidents. The early part of the film recounts, in the style of a documentary but narrated by the so far unidentified characters, the effects of the Hiroshima bomb on August 6, 1945, in particular the loss of hair and the complete anonymity of the remains of some victims. He had been conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army, and his family was in Hiroshima on that day.

Fahrije’s husband has been missing since the war in Kosovo and her family is struggling financially. In order to provide for them she launches a small agricultural business, but in the traditional patriarchal village where she lives, her ambition and efforts to empower herself and other women are not seen as positive things. She struggles not only to keep her family afloat but also against a hostile community who is rooting for her to fail.

A journalist descends into the dark underbelly of the Iranian holy city of Mashhad as she investigates the serial killings of sex workers by the so called "Spider Killer", who believes he is cleansing the streets of sinners.

A family's peaceful existence is threatened when a busy highway is opened only meters away from their isolated house in the middle of nowhere. Refusing to move, Marthe, Michel and their three children find innovative ways to adapt to their new environment. They continue their happy-go-lucky routine despite the daily stress of hundreds of noisy speeding cars. But suspicions about the highway's unknown long-term dangers cause family tension. Remaining in the disrupted household might not be so easy, but it's still their home.

In hope of a better life, two young couples leave their respective countries. Melinda and Nik leave Albania by boat for Italy, in order to be able to live out their forbidden love. Vera and Marko leave Serbia by train for Austria, traveling through Hungary. Marko, a talented cellist, has the opportunity to enter the renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But upon their arrival at the border, and even though their visas are in order, their problems begin. Despite the fact that they have nothing to do with a serious incident that took place the night before in Kosovo, and because of unfortunate coincidences, they are arrested. Their hope to realize all their dreams in Europe, synonym for the Promised Land, disappear. As is often the case with young people from the Balkans, they are paying for the previous generations' mistakes.

Paulette and her husband have been running a housekeeping school. After the sudden death of her husband, Paulette discovers that the school is on the verge of bankruptcy and has to take her responsibilities.

Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old student in Sweden, started a school strike for the climate as her question for adults was, if you don’t care about my future on earth, why should I care about my future in school? Within months, her strike evolved into a global movement as the quiet teenage girl on the autism spectrum becomes a world-famous activist.

Goalie has just been released from prison after spending a year inside for keeping his mouth shut for his best buddy Ueli. He heads for his hometown of Schummertal, a small town where everyone knows you. He's going to start over, without drugs. Meanwhile, Ueli has gotten ever deeper into drugs, can't understand why Goalie suddenly wants to be a square. Although they've been friends since childhood, everything is different now. Goalie wants a new life but finds his past.

After fifteen years of service, Henri Boulanger is dismissed from his job. Shocked, he tries to commit suicide, but can't go through with it, so he hires a hit man in a shabby bar to murder him in the future at an uncertain time. Shortly afterwards, when he falls in love with Margaret, a flower seller, Henri realizes that his life does still have a meaning. But when he goes back to the bar to cancel the contract, he realizes that it has been destroyed - and there is no way he can contact the murderer...

Ale, a deeply disturbed young man subject to seizures, benignly decides to murder members of his dysfunctional family for altruistic reasons.

Alma is a scientist at Berlin's famous Pergamon Museum. In order to obtain research funds for her studies, she accepts an offer to participate in an extraordinary experiment. For three weeks, she must live with a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence designed to allow it to morph into that of her ideal life partner. Enter Tom, a machine in human form, created to make her happy.

Daniel Blake, 59, who has worked as a joiner most of his life in the North East of England needs help from the State for the first time ever following an illness. He crosses paths with a single mother Katie and her two young children, Daisy and Dylan. Katie’s only chance to escape a one roomed homeless hostel in London is to accept a flat some 300 miles away. Daniel and Katie find themselves in no-man’s land caught on the barbed wire of welfare bureaucracy now played out against the rhetoric of ‘striver and skiver’ in modern day Britain. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, the Prix du public at the 2016 Locarno International Film Festival and the 2017 BAFTA for Outstanding British Film.

The first part leads us to the rehearsals of a small town brass band. Its authoritarian bandleader commands the collection of amateur musicians. Among them is the young, shy trombonist Vlada, who is thinking of sneaking away from the upcoming festival because he wants to see a motorcycle race taking place at the same time. The second part follows a group of young singers applying for the Semafort Theater. Hundreds of young girls have come, some of them talented, some not, some beautiful, some less. Some are very shy, others very ambitious. Among them is a girl named Vera, a semi-professional singer who should have no difficulties.

Giuseppe Verdi's «finest work», as he himself described it, still stands today on the Piazza Buonarroti in Milan. It is the «Casa di riposo», founded by Verdi in 1896 for «people who are less fortunate than I» - people who never made a big career, and people who have long spent their dream salaries. Today they live, all long forgotten, in a small room with a suitcase full of memories.

The extraordinary adventure of the young members of the Piedmont Speleological Group who, having already explored all the caves of Northern Italy, changed course in August 1961 and went South to explore other caves unknown to man.

Leo's got a lot to do. A lot. He has a small sanitation company. And he is a single father of two teenage children. Diana is an artist, dreaming into the day. Her art doesn't sell at all. Now her landlord is also putting pressure on her, wanting his money. Diana senses her big chance when she has to paint a painting on the office wall of a lawyer. This is how she meets Leo - he needs legal assistance because erotic photographs of his daughter have appeared on the Internet. Silvio Soldini interweaves various stories, cleverly bringing them together. Besides Diana and Leo, there is Elia, who secretly raises a stork, the urban hermit Amanzio, Leo's late wife Teresa and a mysterious private detective...

A traffic accident in which Camilla, a lawyer, is involved results in the death of a young man; this forces her to investigate and face unfamiliar places and situations. While on this journey, she will meet Bruno and rediscover herself.

Cesare, a former human trafficker, finds the corpse of his nephew Fausto a remote Piedmont valley. In search of the murderer, he himself is suspected. He is also pressured by a young, rebellious villager: Sergio, who wants to escape from the valley and his father, wants to bring refugees abandoned on an alp across the border. In order to help the boy and the refugees, Cesare confronts his fate…

Oscar, not quite a child anymore, scavenges for scrap metal for his father. He spends his life in improvised landfills among what remains of leftovers. Worlds apart, yet close-by, there is Stanley. He tidies the church in exchange for a monetised hospitality, picks fruits, herds sheep: anything that keep his foreign body busy. Oscar, the young Sicilian, and Stanley the Nigerian don’t seem to have much in common. Except for the feeling of being thrown into the world, to suffer the same refusal, the same overwhelming wave of choices imposed on them by others.

The experiment is a journey through the remotest time and on the smallest scale that we can imagine: an exploration of matter about one millionth of a second following the Big Bang that generated our universe. As the new experiment at CERN proceeds in its exploration of the mysterious energy that animates the universe, scientists and artists guide us towards the shadow line where science and art, in different ways, pursue truth and beauty. Some of these men and women believe in god, while others believe only in experiment and doubt. But in their search for truth they are all alert to an elusive sixth – or seventh – sense… the sense of beauty.

Palermo, Sicily, 1980. Mafia member Tommaso Buscetta decides to move to Brazil with his family fleeing the constant war between the different clans of the criminal organization. But when, after living several misfortunes, he is forced to return to Italy, he makes a bold decision that will change his life and the destiny of Cosa Nostra forever.

Christian, a reclusive young man from Leipzig, gets a job working the night shift at a big-box store. He's trained to stocks goods and operate a forklift by Bruno, a wistful former truck driver, who introduces Christian to a colorful group of overnight workers, including Marion, with whom Christian develops a troubled infatuation.

Western frontiers of the USSR, 1942. The region is under German occupation, and local partisans are fighting a brutal resistance campaign. A train is derailed not far from the village, where Sushenya, a rail worker, lives with his family. Innocent Sushenya is arrested with a group of saboteurs, but the German officer makes a decision not to hang him with the others and sets him free. Rumours of Sushenya’s treason spread quickly, and partisans Burov and Voitik arrive from the forest to get revenge. As the partisans lead their victim through the forest, they are ambushed, and Sushenya finds himself one-to-one with his wounded enemy. Deep in an ancient forest, where there are neither friends nor enemies, and where the line between treason and heroism disappears, Sushenya is forced to make a moral choice under immoral circumstances.

Santiago de Cuba, January 19th, 1819. Coming from Lausanne, Enrique Faber, a Swiss doctor and surgeon, arrives on the island, a Spanish province, hoping to find his son, who has been kidnapped…

Bombs, war, angry bearded men, shrouded sobbing women, shattered cities: Iraq, as seen through the eyes of the western media these days. These images are juxtaposed with those from the fifties and seventies: films with frivolous music, unveiled women who study; elegantly dressed men in Bagdad, a modern city. How did it come to this? Film director Samir tells the story of his globalised middle-class Iraqi family, scattered between Auckland, Moscow, Paris, London and Buffalo, New York.

Following the death of her two children, Isadora Duncan created the solo Mother in which a mother cradles her child in a moment of extreme tenderness, then lets it go. A century later, four women encounter this heart-rending dance.

Having doubts about the guilt of the obvious suspect in the murder of an eight year old girl, a police detective decides to investigate the case on his own.

More focused on the act committed than on the needs of those involved, penal justice has certain limitations. The film explores the difficult connection between victims trying to rebuild their lives and perpetrators disposed to taking responsibility. Restorative justice encourages the parties to manage their conflicts themselves, helping them to free themselves from their status. An intimate, emotional film in which the barriers between reality and fiction fade away.

After most of her family is murdered in a terrorist bombing, a young woman is unknowingly lured into joining the very group that killed them.

After losing her virginity, Isabelle takes up a secret life as a call girl, meeting her clients for hotel-room trysts. Throughout, she remains curiously aloof, showing little interest in the encounters themselves or the money she makes.

Broke, with nothing but her cat to her name and doors closing in her face, Paula is back in Paris after a long absence. As she meets different people along the way, there is one thing she knows for sure: she's determined to make a new start and she'll do it with style and panache.

In 1968, Czechoslovakian director Jiří Menzel wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film with CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS - his first feature film ever. Only one year later his next film LARKS ON A STRING is banned by the government. But Menzel decides to stay in socialist Czechoslovakia and continues working as director and actor for theatre and film. His comedies and costume dramas are a commercial success, gently testing the boundaries of authorities with his well hidden political messages. Today, filmmakers like Miloš Forman, Ken Loach, Emir Kusturica or István Szabó are amongst his admirers and friends. JIRÍ MENZEL - TO MAKE A COMEDY IS NO FUN tells the story of this exceptional filmmaker for the first time.

The European equivalent of "The Return of the Secaucus 7," this Swiss film looks at the lives of several men and women in their 30s as they confront the slim gains of the "revolutionary" sixties. Max, a dissatisfied copy editor; Myriam, a redhead into tantric sex; and Marie, a supermarket checker who gives unauthorized discounts to the elderly, search for renewed meaning on a communal farm. The title character, a six-year-old child, is the carrier of their hopes for the future.

A silent film in black and white, based on a novel from 1911, written by Juhani Aho (1861 - 1921), the Finnish writer. The story tells of an older man, Juha (Sakari Kuosmanen), who lives with his young wife Marja (Kati Outinen) in the Finnish hinterland. One day a clever Russian representative, Shemeikka (André Wilms), persuades Marja to accompany him on his travels. The consequences are tragic. Shemeikka, actually a pimp, picks Marja up on a cabbage field and kidnaps her in his fancy sports car to Helsinki, where he runs a nightclub.

A comedy about aging, youth and other eternal truths. Of all days, precisely on her fiftieth birthday, Julia has to experience that age makes you invisible. Frustrated, she goes shopping and makes an acquaintance, spontaneously deciding to spend the evening with this stranger, rather than with the guests of her own birthday party. They wait for her in a restaurant, all dressed up and groomed, lively debating the years that have passed. The truths and wisdom of Julia's closest friends on aging and growing old are drowned increasingly in sufficient quantities of alcohol. In the mean time, on her eightieth birthday, Leonie, sulking over the loss of youth, is rebelling against her daughter, the senior citizen's home, conventions, and old age in general - and joyfully sabotaging the party in her honor.

In the midst of a divorce, Miriam Besson decides to ask for exclusive custody of her son, in order to protect him from a father that she is accusing of violence. The judge-in-charge of the file grants a shared custody to the father whom it considers abused. Taken as a hostage between his parents, Julien Besson will do everything to prevent the worst from happening.

Drawing inspiration from the death-squad murders of several Gypsy families in Hungary in 2008, director Bence Fliegauf's chilling and unforgettable real-life horror story follows a family whose dreams of emigration and escape are suddenly, horribly destroyed.

Four Sicilian episodes after the 'Novelle per un anno', in which Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello wrote down earthy and extraordinary stories that his governess once told him. The Vienna Film Museum writes: "What remains incessantly perceptible in these tragic, lyrical and grotesque episodes about painful mothers, moon-addicted farmers, rebellious shepherds, fools and shawls is the powerful, sweeping lust for narration, the infatuation with the glare of day and night, the passion for sensuous, pasty pictures and the love for the country and its creatures. In the fifth episode, which talks abou Pirandello himself, the film comes to life. A journey into childhood. A down-fall over the white, wonderful sand cliffs of Lipari to the sea, which is drunken blue and green: a moment of happiness, a lust that does not want to end".

Maxime and Mélanie, both 15 years old and barely out of childhood, are in love. One day, Mélanie finds out she's pregnant. Maxime wants to keep the baby no matter what.

Fifty years after her graduation, Senta von Meissen invites eight former school friends to a class reunion at her castle. The table is set for ten people. One place remains empty: Teddy, the hostess's once great school sweetheart, died in an accident on the Rhine Falls during the after-graduation trip. But was it really an accident? The evening turns into a murderous act of revenge.

Two women moved into a new housing estate in 1957. Now both are over 90 years old and could actually enjoy their retirement. But they have to leave their familiar surroundings after more than 60 years because the houses are being demolished.

Klingenhof: A courtyard in a part of Zurich which is inhabited by “all nations”; domicile of the authors; a film spontaneously grown out of the idea, Why not start a project just in front of one's own door? Meeting faces, destinies, by chance, following the word of Claudio Magris, Any place can be the centre of the world. Of course there are at once questions about the origins of the inhabitants, about feeling homesick, being well or not in a foreign country, about how comes you feel at home, generally, at a certain place or not. Friendships are beginning to arise, faces become familiar. Young and old people look for adventures of their own in the courtyard, one arrives, one goes and turns back, maybe one leaves forever. The work on the film was overshaded by the premature death of Hans Stürm, both companion and cameraman.

An ordinary day in the megacity of Istanbul: Ten-year-old Cemo sells paper tissues in the streets, Hayat is controlled by her husband and transsexual Ebru sells her body. All three have a secret love and they do everything to satisfy their longing, if only for a moment. An authentic, delicate and unsettling story about love, death and the Turkish society at the beginning of the 21st century.

Upstanding community leader Nils has just won an award for "Citizen of the Year" when he learns the news that his son has died of a heroin overdose. Suspecting foul play, Nils begins to investigate, and soon finds himself at the center of an escalating underworld gang war between Serbian drug dealers and a sociopathic criminal mastermind known only as “The Count.”

In 2013, an ancient statue of Apollo, the god of arts, beauty and divinations, is found off the coast of Gaza. When it disappears under strange circumstances, rumors quickly spread regarding this mysterious treasure. Both an investigative film and a reflection on history, The Apollo of Gaza immerses us in the little-known reality of a land ravaged by wars and blockades.

When Abel learns that his mother is about to marry a man in prison, he freaks out. With the help of his best friend, he will do whatever it takes to protect her. But meeting his new stepfather may well offer him a new perspective.

Between the autumn of 1897 and the summer of 1898, four families live together on a farm near Bergamo in the Bassa Bergamasca. Among the members of the community there is a deep spiritual connection that leads them to experience beautiful and tragic things, ordinary moments and extraordinary events together. Two young people court each other and marry; a penniless father secretly cuts down a tree to carve new wooden shoes for his son, who goes to school six kilometres a day; an old man fertilizes his tomatoes with chicken excrement so that they ripen faster. Ermanno Olmi's L'albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) is an almost documentary chronicle of everyday farming life at the end of the penultimate century, epically laid out and following the rhythm of the seasons. Winner of the Palme d’Or Cannes in 1978.

Chloé, a fragile young woman, falls in love with her psychoanalyst, Paul. A few months later she moves in with him, but soon discovers that her lover is concealing a part of his identity.

The first novel by Elena Ferrante in the adaptation by Mario Martone. What happened to Amalia? Who was with her the night she died? Is Amalia, as the last hours of her life suggest, the woman her daughter Della has always imagined: equivocal, satisfied, predisposed to secret deviances and able to escape her husband's obsessive surveillance?

Let’s imagine that there is a new craft, and that it is called "replacing". Let’s imagine an unemployed man who would practice such craft every day. So much so, that he would actually work beyond measure, and that he would be, in his own way, a happy man. All he does is take on, for a few hours, the role of absentees who duck - for more or less serious reasons, their official occupation. He makes do with just enough, our hero, because money isn’t everything in life: one needs to keep in shape, and not letting oneself go in times of, how to say, dark crises. Let’s imagine, also, that there is a twenty years old young man (his son) who plays the sax like a God, and is therefore lucky, as he is an artist. Let’s then imagine Lucia, restless and wary, that hides a secret behind her desire to get ahead. Will they get to the next episode safe and sound?

An oasis on the outskirts of Naples. Here children experience an everyday life that is completely different from what they otherwise know. With commitment and empathy, Giovanna manages a place full of creativity, where girls and boys spend their school-free hours. But then the young wife of an unscrupulous Camorra member with her two small children seeks protection in the institution - and Giovanna is faced with a decision that could change everything...

After the death of his mother, a middle-aged insurance salesman inherits her small cottage. Selling the cottage, which is attractively located near the center of a big city, makes him a rich man and he buys a large house in the countryside. The salesman then decides to throw a big garden party and invite all his colleagues from the office. Loosened by large amounts of alcohol, the guests gradually shed all their inhibitions and reveal their innermost frustrations.

1971. Delphine, the daughter of farmers, moves to Paris to break free from the shackles of her family and to gain her financial independence. Carole is a Parisian, living with Manuel, actively involved in the stirrings of the feminist movement. Their encounter turns their lives upside down.

A man and a woman make love secretly in a room. They desire each other, want each other, bite each other occasionally. Sweet fleeting moments at dusk. At least that's what the man thinks they are. For his fifth feature film, actor and director Mathieu Amalric adapts the exciting crime novel LA CHAMBRE BLEUE by Georges Simenon. Playing the story of Simenon in the 60's, Amalric has placed his version of it entirely in the present.

Abel and Marianne discover that their 13-year-old son Joseph has secretly sold their most precious possessions. They soon find out that Joseph is not the only one - all over the world, hundreds of children have joined forces to finance a mysterious project. Their mission is to save the planet.

Enchanted toys come to life to do battle with a holiday-hating villain who is bent on stopping Christmas.

Raf and Julie, a couple on the verge of breaking up, find themselves in an emergency ward bordering on collapse on the evening of a Parisian Yellow Vest protest. Their encounter with Yann, an angry and injured demonstrator, will shatter each person's certainties and prejudices. Outside, the tension escalates.

The young priest Don Giulio left his first parish on the small Italian island of Ponza. Here he spent ten happy years: he shared the joys and sorrows of the villagers, was their friend and advisor. His new church is located in a middle-class district of Rome, where his parents, brothers and sisters and his old friends from their student days also live. Here, too, he hopes to be able to help the people, but his optimism is soon destroyed. Not even his closest relatives can save him from disaster: his father leaves the family because of a younger woman, and his mother commits suicide. Finally, Don Giulio resigns and is transferred to a remote village in the mountains, where he hopes to be useful.

The tragic accident of an Italian laborer ,working on the Mont Blanc tunnel.

Untouched natural landscapes of unique beauty can be found in the remote valleys of the Tibetan highlands. Filmmaker Marie Amiguet accompanies renowned nature photographer Vincent Munier and writer Sylvain Tesson on an adventurous journey in search of the snow leopard, a wild animal that very rarely reveals itself to mankind. The unusual journey of these two sympathetic oddballs becomes a contemplative ode to that sublime wilderness which, like the majestic snow cat, is in danger of disappearing. The score by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave compliments Amiguet's documentary, making it a sensory and decelerating experience.

Rosemonde the Salamander is a young girl who gets by thanks to low-paid jobs of all kinds. She is suspected of attempting to kill the uncle with whom she lives. A journalist and a writer are hired to get to the bottom of this mystery, as the basis for a television film scenario. They are unsuccessful however. The truth about Rosemonde and her special appreciation of life continue to elude these two amateur detectives.

Paul, in his fifties, is a filmmaker. He writes a screenplay as if it were his job and starts looking for an actress for the lead role. The fact that he can't find her must be due to something: perhaps there are too many stories, too many images, too many actresses and too little peace. Perhaps it is also a necessity. Paul spontaneously throws away his script. Jean has just finished film school and is hired by Paul as his assistant. One day, Paul comes across an old photo of Dara, an Italian actress he once knew and admired, who has long since disappeared from the screen. Paul asks Jean to find her. Both of them do everything they can to bring her back to the screen. To achieve this, they embark on a world of feelings, confrontations and dreams.

Fabienne is a star of French cinema. She reigns amongst men who love and admire her. When she publishes her memoirs, her daughter Lumir returns from New York to Paris with her husband and young child. The reunion between mother and daughter will quickly turn to confrontation: truths will be told, accounts settled, loves and resentments confessed.

Marcel (André Wilms) is an impoverished Parisian poet and playwright who is evicted from his extremely modest room after he is unable to pay rent for it. While roaming the streets of Paris, he meets Rodolfo (Matti Pellonpää), a painter from Albania who is almost equally poor and is in the country illegally. They quickly discover they are kindred spirits since they both share the same love for art without much regard for their worldly well-being. The two eventually make another friend in Schaunard (Kari Väänänen), an Irish composer who is now renting Marcel's former room. The three friends help each other in the daily struggle to survive by sharing whatever little money they have among each other in order to maintain a basic and simple standard of living. Rodolfo's life is interrupted when he meets Mimi (Évelyne Didi), a poor French girl with whom he falls madly in love. But Rodolfo is soon deported back to Albania due to not having a visa. He is unable to return to Paris for six months and, by then, Mimi has moved on and found another boyfriend. Rodolfo, Marcel and Schaunard scrape together what food they have and have a meal together to celebrate the feast of All Saints. Mimi shows up and informs Rodolfo that she has left her boyfriend to be with him again, but she is ill and dies the next spring.

Naples in the early 1980s. Aldo works as a radio announcer giving passionate literature recommendations. After putting his children to bed and telling them a bedtime story, he enters the kitchen, stands next to his wife Vanda and confesses to cheating on her. Completely surprised by this news, and feeling like the ground has disappeared from under her feet, Vanda doesn't know how to react. What does this mean for her and the children? Thirty years later, Vanda and Aldo are still married. Based on the novel “Forever Connected” by Domenico Starnone, Daniele Luchetti shows that you can never escape your family, even if love draws you into a new relationship. This emotional drama, carried by its strong actors, is a highlight of young Italian cinema. Opening film of the Venice Film Festival 2020.

In the middle of the imposing Icelandic mountain landscape, Maria and Ingvar lead a secluded life on their farm. Their wish to have children has not yet been fulfilled, but they lovingly take care of their sheep flock. One day during lambing season, Maria and Ingvar discover a curious specimen that needs their special attention. Despite all warning signs, they take the strange new-born in. Far from civilization, the new addition to their family makes life complete - but the idyll soon proves deceptive. In his feature film debut, which is fantastic in every way, director Valdimar Jóhannsson skilfully uses dialogue only sparingly, and creates a fairy-tale atmosphere with original imagery. Bittersweet, but not without humour.

LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST is a film about the void. It is a film about despair, about the failure of contemporary society. The prodigal father who figures in almost every Angelopoulos film here has evaporated into his mythical essence - leaving his children to become the wanderers in search of him. In the «chaos», two children appear, little Alexandros and his older sister Voula. In order to exorcise their loneliness, they invent a secret universe for themselves, inhabited by their dreams. Every night they go to a train station to watch the departure of a train to Germany, where they have been deceived by their mother (herself an off-screen presence) into believing that their absent father is living. One night they finally dare to get on the train. But their voyage turns out to be hazardous and pointless and disappointing. They confront suffering, physical and moral illness, jealousy, evil and death, if also love - as many ordeals and rites as initiations. Evading the half-hearted pursuit of the police and uncaring relatives, sneak onto trains, hitchhike in vans and lorries, and suffering poverty, rape and exploitation, take a dangerous leap of faith, an eerie plunge into liberation and danger. The familiar Greek landscape - the cafes, the depopulated towns and deserted beaches - are played for a strangely harsh fairytale quality, seen through the eyes of two children whose introduction to the real world borders on the surreal. The film is filled with extraordinary, unforgettable moments that are at once real and hallucinatory and contains intriguing references to other Angelopoulos' films. The children even encounter the Travelling Players now, thirteen years later, without a stage to act on, their costumes put up for sale. At the end Alexandros tells Voula the same story from Genesis that she told him at the start: «In the beginning there was chaos.» The children do finally reach the border, but of course there is no border with Germany and perhaps the river they cross is actually the Styx and perhaps their whole journey was a search for order in a chaotic world.

The tale of a meeting between Lazzaro, a young peasant so good that he is often mistaken for simple-minded, and Tancredi, a young nobleman cursed by his imagination. A loyal bond is sealed when Tancredi asks Lazzaro to help him orchestrate his own kidnapping.

Meet Adrien! He's 35. He's stuck in a mid-life crisis. He's neurotic and hypochondriac. Tonight he's stuck in an endless family dinner and his girlfriend is not answering his texts. On top of that, his dumb brother-in-law asks him to prepare a speech for his wedding. Could it get even worse?

This is the story of a ball. A grand ball. Every summer, more than two thousand people come from accross Europe to dance together, dance even more, during seven days and seven nights, in the countryside of France. A joyful crowd of men and women from all ages, speaking different languages, beginners, virtuosos, enthusiasts. A crowd that reveals how different it is when we dare look into one's eyes, when we dare touch one another. And how life pounds.

In Lausanne, Léon is involved by accident with a small Leninist group and gets to know Léa, a dedicated activist and the group leader's mistress. The police keep a close watch on them and trouble is bound to follow.

When an African boy arrives by cargo ship in the port city of Le Havre, an aging shoe shiner takes pity on the child and welcomes him into his home.

Using a specially designed transparent 'canvas' to provide an unobstructed view, Picasso creates as the camera rolls. He begins with simple works that take shape after only a single brush stroke. He then progresses to more complex paintings, in which he repeatedly adds and removes elements, transforming the entire scene at will, until at last the work is complete.

An ode to liberated speech and to the power of words, “those one speaks to others, those one speaks in silence”, Alain Tanner’s third film is inspired by a poet and a poetic text which deeply affected him as a young director: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, written in 1939 by Aimé Césaire. A poem extolled by the Surrealists, this seminal flow of anti-colonial thinking by the West-Indian-born poet is the bubbling spring which inspires the gestures and words of the film’s main character, Vincent (François Marthouret), a 30-year-old from Geneva.Weighed down by the monotony and boredom of his life as a well-off westerner, he sells all his possessions and decides to leave for Algeria with his fiancée. The subject is clearly that of escape from one’s place of belonging, a Rimbaudesque theme dear to Tanner, which is here directly linked to the Third Worldist discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. But the strength of the film lies in the way it turns this thinking on its head: on the eve of their departure, chance circumstances prevent the couple from leaving. Instead, they decide to pursue their dream of escape by living hidden away in their empty apartment. Again, Tanner shows that it is the inner mileage travelled that matters, not the arrival at a destination; the posing of a question rather than the answer. As the director says at the beginning of the film: “Speaking words can be an act in itself, it can also be a substitute for action.” This is an important precept for the understanding of Tanner’s cinema: poetry is a form of action, and having it in mind, reciting it, can help to give a new shape to reality: in the film’s final scene, the couple decide to have a child.

An isolated farm in a remote part of the Jura region: this is where Pauline and Alex are living in complete self-sufficient harmony with nature. Their life project is sealed by their love, their ideals and their work. The couple is now ready to take the step towards total independence, and start producing their own electricity. The arrival of Samuel, who comes to install a wind turbine, deeply troubles Pauline, upsetting their relationship and their values.

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.