Robert Ralston

During the traditional carnival celebrations, the dead body of a young girl is found near the small town of Bellinzona, in Southern Switzerland. The officers engaged in the case find themselves investigating crimes rooted in a past full of shadows.

After a car accident, Pastor Peter Aebi (60) is in a persistent vegetative state. His dependent and unhappy wife Katharina (56) and his three adult children Eddi, Silvia, and Johannes must decide whether to let their husband and father live or—as he himself requested in his living will—let him die. Just then, Katharina rediscovers her zest for life thanks to the influence of a burglar who has been caught. And the neighbors suddenly believe that the coma patient is performing minor and major miracles.

Breathlessly energetic Berlin-set hip-hop epic »Status Yo!« employs performers and locations from local music scene to tell an ambitious story of one eventful night in the German capital. With just 24 hours in which to organize the biggest party the city's ever seen, Yan Eq, Jamie, Sera and others must deal with their love lives, tenuous living arrangements and various shady characters on their way to hip-hop glory.

Dracula and back! The urgency of having to go to Transylvania as fast as possible to bring back the remains of his own father turns out to be an adventure of a different kind for Martin. What he thought would be a short trip becomes an extended odyssey through the former east block country. Instead of Count Dracula, Martin meets a Romanian couple, Imre and Agi. Involuntarily bound to each other, they start the search. Through Transylvania, through prejudices, mundane worries and emotions, Martin's German bookkeeper sensibilities come face to face with the simplicity of Hungarian-Rumanian life.

Facing the massive interruption the world went through during the lockdown months, the artistic community did a lot of thinking, about solitude, emptiness, fear of illness and implicitly of the future, and the relationship with domestic space and technology. A group of Swiss film directors turned these themes into the shorts that became the national project known as Collection Lockdown by Swiss Filmmakers. The Locarno Film Festival is showing nine of these films on the big screen, showcasing the work of filmmakers who continued creating cinema to share their experience from during those days.