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Ruedi Gerber

Ruedi Gerber

Directing

Biography

Ruedi Gerber founded ZAS Film AG in Zurich in 1992. Gerber started out as a stage actor in the early 1980s, playing a wide range of theaters in the German-speaking world (Mannheim, Basel, Wuppertal etc.), initially as a member of a theater company and later in the independent and experimental drama scene. From 1986 to 1990 he studied film at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York and graduated with honors. His first documentary films, Living with the Spill and Meta Mecano, found international recognition, and his first feature film, Heartbreak Hospital, starring Patricia Clarkson, came out in 2002. He gained international fame with three documentaries about the world-renowned postmodern dancer Anna Halprin, especially Breath Made Visible. Gerber also produces international films, including La Fuga – Girl in Flight (directed by Sandra Vannucchi), which was nominated for the European Film Academy Award, Basmati Blues (starring Brie Larson and Donald Sutherland) and Letters from Baghdad (by Sabine Krayenbühl), which won awards at a number of festivals.

Known For

Heartbreak Hospital
7.3

Neely, an aspiring actress, gets a role on the popular soap opera "Heartbreak Hospital." Her neighbor, Lottie, a huge fan of the show, can't differentiate between fiction and reality, and her obsession and jealousy endanger Neely and the rest of the cast.

Heartbreak Hospital

2002
Basmati Blues
4.1

Linda Watt is a sheltered but brilliant young scientist who is plucked out of her company's lab and sent to India by her CEO to sell "Rice 9," a genetically modified rice she's created. However, unbeknownst to her, the rice will destroy the Indian farmers she thinks she's helping.

Basmati Blues

2017
Girl in Flight
6.3

11-year-old Silvia's life at home is consumed by her mother’s clinical depression. When no one will take the time to fulfill her dream to visit Rome, she runs away, determined to see it for herself. On a train, she meets a Roma girl, Emina, and begins following her through the streets of Rome to her gypsy camp.

Girl in Flight

2019
Letters from Baghdad
6.7

Gertrude Bell, the most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day, shaped the destiny of Iraq after WWI in ways that still reverberate today.

Letters from Baghdad

2017
Obsessed with Light
8.0

Loïe Fuller, stage name of Marie Louise Fuller: the American actress and dancer trained in burlesque, circuses and variety shows who, in the 1890s, signed by the Folies Bergère of Paris, became a star. She was portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec, loved by the symbolists, the inspiration for Art Nouveau, in her shows she combined dance, spirals of fabric and light, reflected from behind or from below through the glass floor that she had created. She transformed into the "Fairy of Light", was taken up (especially in her Serpentine Dance) by Georges Méliès and Alice Guy and influenced René Clair's early films.

Obsessed with Light

2023
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SENIORS ROCKING explores the artistic process of Anna Halprin, a pioneer of American dance, through the prism of a single performance piece. The film retraces not only the development of a unique performance with residents of two nursing homes in California, but also the growth of a sense of community when fifty people from various walks of life, age 65 to 100, join forces to perform together. Underpinned by Halprin’s conviction that dance and movement embolden people to express themselves and, in so doing, change their lives, the film shows how the participants give physical shape to their personal messages for posterity through a dance performance.

Seniors Rocking

2010
Tatti in the World
N/A

During decades of globalization, countless rural communities worldwide found themselves abandoned - from America's Midwest to Italy's mountain villages and places like Tatti face extinction. In this small Italian town, elderly residents lacked the strength to reinvent their fading world and lost hope – until outsiders arrived.

Tatti in the World

2026
Meta-Mecano
N/A

The Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland, designed by Mario Botta, opened in 1996, five years after the Swiss sculptor's death. META MECANO is a poetic depiction of the genesis of this mono-graphic museum, from the builders' first plans and Mario Botta's designs to its construction and the assembly of Tinguely's fragile mobile sculptures. In interviews with Mario Botta, Tinguely's wife Niki de Saint Phalle, museum director Pontus Hultén and Tinguely himself, the film goes on to explore the mission of museums and of art in general today. META MECANO is a unique document on the significance of the artist Jean Tinguely and on the role that museums play in our day and age.

Meta-Mecano

1997
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Café Mecanique is a short phantasmagoria about food, seduction, unfulfilled longing and love, set to Carla Bley's Musique Mécanique.

Café Mécanique

1990
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Exposes the dichotomy between Exxon's elaborate publicity of its clean up operation and the actual effectiveness, giving voice to the people most affected by a tragedy, and the community that lives with the effects of the spill.

Living with the Spill

1991
Journey in Sensuality: Anna Halprin and Rodin
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Auguste Rodin's sculptures and Anna Halprin's creative process come together in this poetic film of dances in nature.

Journey in Sensuality: Anna Halprin and Rodin

2016
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It takes place at a birthday party on a single fateful evening. Lenny, the birthday boy, is an insecure young man who has something to prove. After he's already had too much to drink, his cynical drinking buddy Willy goads him into proving his marksmanship by trying to shoot a bottle off his wife's head with a revolver. This black comedy is a farcical twist on the William Tell legend and on the true story of William Burroughs, who, likewise under the influence, tried to shoot a glass off his wife's head, missed and shot her dead instead.

Midnight Barbecue

1991
Breath Made Visible: Anna Halprin
7.2

BREATH MADE VISIBLE is the first feature length film about the life and career of Anna Halprin, the American dance pioneer who has helped redefine our notion of modern art with her belief in dance's power to teach, heal, and transform at all ages of life. This cinematic portrait blends recent interviews with counterparts such as the late Merce Cunningham, archival footage, including her establishment of the first multiracial dance company in the U.S., and excerpts of current performances such as "Parades and Changes" at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, to weave a stunning, inspiring account of one of the most important cultural icons in modern dance.

Breath Made Visible: Anna Halprin

2009