Voices from an Inner Space
Swiss Documentary Cinema: Travelers, Militants and Visionaries

C’ÉTAIT HIER

Omaggio a/Tribute to Jacqueline Veuve

Switzerland 2010 80’

Directed by: Jacqueline Veuve

"Lucens, summer 1937, lined up on the side of the road some spectators are waiting for the Tour de Suisse to pass by. The children back then still remember it. Their stories call to mind the country’s working class." The difficult Thirties, a country divided into wealthy and working classes. The female condition and the bicycle as the object of desire… Jacqueline Veuve uses personal histories to create the portrait of an epoch to produce one of her most personal and persuasive films.

Monday 15th November, Spazio Uno, 7:30 pm
CHRONIQUE PAYSANNE EN GRUYÈRE

Omaggio a/Tribute to Jacqueline Veuve

Switzerland 1990 87’

Directed by: Jacqueline Veuve

The Bapst live in La Roche and in the summer part of the family hikes up the mountain pasture. Despite the extreme care taken to respect their individual identity, the Bapst family becomes a model of a disappearing economy. Instead of portraying a stereotypical Switzerland, "Chronique Paysanne en Gruyère" is a film filled with phantoms, fantasy and fables. As precise as she is delicate, Jacqueline Veuve weaves a symbolic theme into the fabric of her realistic documentary, making it a timeless, borderless work of art.

Sunday 14th November, Spazio Uno, 5:30 pm
FACE ADDICT

Italy/Switzerland 2005 102’

Directed by: Edo Bertoglio

"I escape from New York with – my only baggage – a trunk full of photos: my archives, my memories, my scraps, emulsions and emotions of years that left deep and lasting marks on me." A film of travel and memory, of discovery and reconstruction, "Face Addict" is a portrait of the New York downtown artistic and musical scene (Walter Steding, Glenn O'Brien, John Lurie, Maripol, Debbie Harry for the band Blondie, Wendy Whitelaw, James Nares and Victor Bockris), but also an overview of life confronted with the most difficult challenge, the passing of time.

Friday 19th November, Odeon, 10:45 pm
GENET À CHATILA

Switzerland 1999 99’

Directed by: Richard Dindo

Following a text by Jean Genet, Dindo visits Chatila in 1999 and investigates the present in order to trace the past. Travelling with him in his journey the young actress Mounia Raoui reads Genet’s text. A passionate praise of the Palestinian people and a prosecution of the Israeli government, who intentionally disposed a massacre of civilians, Genet à Chatila is a powerful political movie, exemplary in its actualization of the past.

Monday 15th November, Spazio Uno, 9:30 pm
GESCHICHTE DER NACHT

Switzerland 1979 60’

Directed by: Clemens Klopfenstein

At the front door of this «Story of the Night» the character Leopold Bloom welcomes us. The Ulysses created by Joyce alludes to both the universe of the modern city and to the stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Similarly, this movie is a journey through a land where the distinctions between past and present, between rites and everyday occurrences become blurred. For 150 nights and exploring 50 different cities, Klopfenstein managed to create with his most delicate film an ephemeral and captivating world.

Saturday 20th November, Spazio Uno, 7:30 pm
IL BACIO DI TOSCA

Tosca's Kiss

Switzerland 1984 87’

Directed by: Daniel Schmid

Accompanied by the «sensitive camera» of Renato Berta, Schmid finds in an «old people’s home» in Milan the peculiar atmosphere of his cinema. The facility, established in 1902, as requested in Giuseppe Verdi’s will, hosts retired lyrical singers. Despite their age. their aches and pains, the elderly guests of Verdi’s house have not lost their zest for "bel canto" and once placed in front of a camera they seize the stage and start reviving their past.

Sunday 14th November, Spazio Uno, 9:30 pm
LES HOMMES DU PORT

Switzerland 1995 64’

Directed by: Alain Tanner

As a slow wide shot unveils the harbour of Genova, an I-narrator recounts a man’s past. Yesterday, Alain Tanner was 17 and was discovering a country, whose cinema he so much loved, through a peculiar, bustling city. Today, the filmmaker goes back to that city. He notices the crisis of the harbour, where goods have become anonymous and workers are every day less necessary. An homage to the ethics of work, "Les Hommes du port" is a reflection about time, about the here and the elsewhere.

Friday 19th November, Odeon, 3:00 pm
MAIS IM BUNDESHUUS - LE GENIE HELVETIQUE

Corn in Parliament

Switzerland 2003 90’

Directed by: Jean-Stéphane Bron

October 14th, 2001. Room «87», Federal Palace of Switzerland. Twenty-five members of a rules committee gather to discuss for the first time a law on genetics. For a whole year, Jean-Stéphane Bron patiently lingers at the room entrance to gather comments, grasp remarks and follow the legislation process. Sweet and ironic, this film is a large metaphor of community life and the portrait of a nation.

Thursday 18th November, Spazio Uno, 5:00 pm
MIDDLE OF THE MOMENT

Switzerland 1995 80’

Directed by: Nicolas Humbert, Werner Penzel

Iconoclast travellers, Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel explore the core of nomadic life itself, gathered through the collaboration with the poet-clown Robert Lax and the musician Fred Firth. More than a movie on Tuaregs, street artists, and their analogies (tents, deserts and no man’s lands of the suburbs, the faces marked by the toil of the street), "Middle of the Moment" is a fascinating visual poem.

Friday 19th November, Spazio Uno, 7:00 pm
PAS LES FLICS, PAS LES NOIRS, PAS LES BLANCS

Switzerland 2002 72’

Directed by: Ursula Meier

Alain Devegney is a out of the ordinary policeman. He decides to join the army and takes a liking to extreme right-wing groups only to wind up starting an intercultural mediation project in his hometown of Geneva, largely populated by foreigners. "Pas les flics, pas les noirs, pas les blancs" – despite its title – is a «positive» film that translates desire into will and conflict into dialogue.

Monday 15th November, Odeon, 3:00 pm
PREMIER JOUR

(Serie di 11 cortometraggi)/(A series of 11 short films)

Switzerland 2003 0’

Directed by: Fernand Melgar

The first day of school (from the point of view of the teacher). The first fight. The birth of a first child (for a couple sui generis). The ordainment of a new priest… Armed with his lucid eye and typical attention to detail, Fernand Melgar inspects and dissects Swiss society. Joys and sorrows make up this small mosaic of eleven short films, whose protagonists are normal citizens on the eve of life-changing events. "La Déchirure" is an intense tale about a Swiss woman undergoing heart surgery (the network refused to air it because of its strong content).

The episodes will be screened before the films in the retrospective
REQUIEM

Switzerland 1992 80’

Directed by: Reni Mertens, Walter Marti

Even more than an extraordinary funeral oration, Requiem is first of all a homage to a whole lost humanity. The tangible mark of a double event that lies underneath the surface of the world. Assisted in a wonderful photography and music editing work, Reni Mertens and Walter Marti undertook a journey in those parts of the world where this memory is conserved. Mostly cemeteries, but also vast fields swept by the wind.

Thursday 16th November, Odeon, 3 pm
SIAMO ITALIANI

Die Italiener

Switzerland 1964 79’

Directed by: Alexander J. Seiler

"Siamo Italiani is indeed a work of social criticism. I was first struck by the terrible living conditions of those Italians who moved to Switzerland in the early 60s." With this movie, released in 1964, Seiler brings the Swiss documentary into the modern era, an era in which cinema – through new lightweight technologies – allows people to express themselves directly.

Sunday 14th November, Spazio Uno, 3:30 pm
WAR PHOTOGRAPHER

Switzerland 2001 96’

Directed by: Christian Frei

Christian Frei’s "War Photographer", nominated for an Oscar and awarded several prizes in more than one festival, is a film about images, rather than war. How is an image selected, constructed and displayed? And what is the relation between the shooting subject and the captured image? Seen over ten years later, besides preserving all its emotional power, the documentary presents itself as a present x-ray of the globalized world.

Tuesday 16th November, Spazio Uno, 7:00 pm