Writing
The Alarm Phone: a hotline for refugees in distress at sea in the Mediterranean.
Collective singing calls for deep listening and mutual attunement – heard in the voices of the sisters of a historic convent, echoed in traditional male vocal ensembles, carried through football stadiums, and rising in the resounding protest chants of women’s marches.
A documentary about entertainment and home, filmed in Switzerland and California.
Berlin, an old apartment building between the S-Bahn and the street. Seventeen people live there. The old photographer Kempinski, shrouded in his memories. Hannelore, dreaming of distant lands, temporarily sharing her apartment with her lovesick niece. Bona, who occasionally drinks a beer with his roommate and teaches French in the kitchen. The two teenage sisters with their newly in love mom. The medieval caretaker couple and the young couple whose daughter Paula would rather sit in the stairwell than go to school. On the face of it, they all have nothing in common apart from their home address. The film tells in microscopically accurate, realistic visual language and on changing levels of the common everyday life of small people.
Documentary by Ciro Cappellari
A city park in autumn. A girl practices football. A boy pirouettes. A couple picnics. A young man waits. For a brief moment the figures intermingle. FE-MALE: a little apparition in everyday life.
Documentary about human hair, including its political significance.
A true pioneer of Swiss cinema, Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch (1917-2003) followed an unusual path throughout her life. The daughter of Judeo-Russian immigrants, she grew up in Zurich. She married a son of Hermann Hesse, with whom she had three children. Influenced by the artistic work of her parents, she worked as an illustrator, then as a reporter and photographer, always mindful of her independence. At the age of fifty, she began making films. Her first experimental shorts immediately earned her invitations to various film festivals and a resounding response abroad.
Women bring children into the world. But when, as in the case of Sandra, Jasmine and Jennifer, you're not yet eighteen and your belly is starting to round out, that's when people look at you sideways. And once the baby's here, life with a child is a far greater challenge than we ever imagined in our rosy teenage dreams. A long-term study of three very young mothers, their children and their fathers. A film about their first great love, their professional futures and their dreams for the future.
Animal tamers from various continents shine in the spotlight and struggle for their existence behind the scenes. Between toiling and smiling, the female circus artists disclose their passion for their 'wild' animals and extraordinary profession: a daily life full of dedication and discipline in the midst of mortal danger.
LA DADA – KING DEER is a filmic ode to the artist Sophie Taeuber (1889 – 1943) and to her dadaistic work. A dancer and a singer perform a duet with Taeuber’s marionettes and revive Dada as a collective art – still fresh and experimental after 100 years of its appearance. The masking of dancer and singer bring to mind the courage of Sophie Taeuber. Despite the threat of dismissal from the School of Applied Arts she continued performing as a dadaist – henceforth, dancing with mask and pseudonym.
They stand for wildness and domestication at the same time, symbolise eroticism, power or even loyalty and friendship. Even as supporting actors, cats and dogs play an important role in art and reveal a lot about the relationship between humans and nature. With a new perspective at the work of famous and forgotten artists, the film shows the historical transformation of the four-legged friends from farm animal to prestige object and today's domestic companion.
Invited by the then 74-year-old James Danaqyumptewa, two Swiss artists come to witness and document the non-violent resistance of the Hopi in Arizona, combining sketches, photography and animation. At once a message in a bottle and a cry for help.
