Switzerland

Swiss Film Prize: Best Documentary 2001

The odyssey of the fortune teller Daniele von Arb, who as a 16-year-old entered the revolutionary underground with his friends and made headlines as a top Swiss terrorist.

Daniele von Arb was 16 years old in 1970 when he and some friends of the same age from the Altstetten district of Zurich founded a revolutionary cell to rid the world of injustice. Shortly thereafter, the cell was listed by the CIA, the U.S. secret service agency, under the code name «Annebäbi» in chart on international terrorism.Read More »

Rhythmic pumping, reminiscent of steamboat pistons, accompanies the huge mechanical glass doors as they swing open and shut to accommodate a steady stream of people. Welcome to the machine! – the words beat the same rhythm in my head. And indeed, the world we have just been invited to enter does in fact resemble a futurist machine. It is a colossus of concrete and glass, with a heart deep inside, a computer heart pulsating with an endless stream of data, while hundreds of beings in its labyrinthine veins are busy or trying to keep the coursing data under control, the effort – invoking a curious language: cis, Cas, keeping and – in ocs, Tkna… (from press sheet)Read More »

Quote:
Summer 1939. The explorer and photographer Ella Maillart and the writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach set off from Geneva by car with Kafiristan as their destination. Ella Maillart – Double Journey is the story of a special friendship, an escape from Europe, from the Geneva of 1939, already showing the early signs of what was to become the Nazi nightmare. The two intellectual and rebellious women throw themselves into an adventure. A search for the exotic, the unspoiled, the faraway, everything that can put up a wall between the East and a Europe that will be difficult to go back to ‒ so strong is the impending specter of evil.Read More »

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Schmid’s satire on 19th-century class relations is also a thinly veiled commentary on the failure of the 1968 political revolution. Once a year, an aristocratic Austrian family holds a traditional feast at which masters and servants trade places. A troupe of actors (including cult cabaret artist Ingrid Caven) are hired to entertain the guests, performing fragments from the “cultural scrap heap”: GONE WITH THE WIND, Madame Bovary, Tennessee Williams, Swan Lake. The decadent proceedings take on a dangerous edge when the actors incite the servants to revolt against their masters-but is the Revolution also part of the act?Read More »

Synopsis:
A handful of people are dissatisfied with their actually good life: while Ludwig (Rudolf Nadler) would like to go on vacation, his girlfriend Anna (Anne Knaak) only has eyes for Stefan (Matthias Tiefenbach) and sinks into work. Toni and Cyrill (Dina Leipzig and Cyrille Rey-Coquais) almost only argue with each other and the actor Max (Christoph Krix) wishes for more glorious times.Read More »

In Borneo, at the edge of the tropical forest, Kéria is given a baby orangutan. With the forest under greater threat than ever, Kéria, Selaï and the little primate, Oshi, will have to face many obstacles.Read More »

Tibetan Buddhist Master Choogyal Namkhai Norbu watches as his western-born son, Yeshi, who was recognized at birth as the reincarnation of a famous spiritual master, considers departing from tradition to embrace the modern world.Read More »

Lena is in love with her brother Noah. In the desperate attempt to conquer her feelings, she retreats into a world of her own.

Quote:
The juxtaposition between reality and onirism, the lawful and the illicit, dominates Imbach’s entire film. An intentional ambiguity that destabilises and intrigues.
Muriel Del Don, CineuropaRead More »

In 1941, the writers Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet fled the Nazi-occupied zone of France, arriving in Nice. There they met and befriended Henri Matisse. Aragon resolved to write a book about the grat painter, but it wasn’t until 1970, just after Elsa’s death, that he finally completed “Henri Matisse, roman”.Read More »