Lionel Baier

No description available.

Geneva, April 2015. In the hushed corridors of a luxury hotel, high-tension international negotiations get underway between the United States and Iran, suspected of secretly developing the atomic weapon. Alexandra Weiss, head of the Swiss diplomatic mission, is trying to maintain a fragile balance between the parties operating behind the scenes. The unexpected arrival of her former love, Payam Sanjabi, an Iranian engineer whose life is under threat, will complicate her task dangerously...

April, an idealistic lawyer dedicated to lost causes, agrees to defend Cosmos, a dog that has bitten three people, leading to the first canine trial. She has no choice but to win the case, as otherwise, her unusual client will be put down.

Competitive bodybuilder Léa Pearl is preparing to compete for the prestigious Miss Heaven title. Her coach, Al, a former bodybuilding star, hopes that, thanks to Léa, he will be back in the spotlight once again. But at the last minute, Léa's ex arrives with their son Joseph, who she hasn't seen in four years.

Maud is an architect and a mother. Due to a misunderstanding, she wins the competition to refurbish the parvis of Notre-Dame. Torn between these responsibilities and love issues, she will go through an emotional storm.

Nathalie Adler is on a mission for the EU in Sicily. She organizes the next visit of Macron and Merkel to a migrant camp. Their presence has a high symbolic value to show that everything is under control. But who still wants to believe in this European family on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Probably not Albert, Nathalie's son, an NGO activist who arrives without warning. He, moreover, no longer believes in his mother.

An eccentric family portrait set during the May 1968 protests in Paris. A nine-year-old boy stays with his grandparents and uncles while his parents protest. When an illustrious guest seeks refuge in the apartment, the family’s dynamics change.

It is April 1974 and Julie Dujonc-Renens, young feminist journalist and the cunning Joseph-Marie Cauvin, leading reporter for the Swiss radio, have been sent to Portugal to investigate Switzerland’s aid to poor countries. Sparks fly during the bus trip with Bob, sound engineer approaching retirement. The projects financed by Switzerland prove to be calamitous and the workers’ revolution that suddenly breaks out doesn’t help, obliging our heroes to disregard first the radio’s management, and then their own codes of conduct.

On February 27, 2009, pupil Benjamin Feller commits a crime which he has meticulously described beforehand in a diary entry. He goes to the post office to send the diary entry to his teacher before he shoots his parents and turns himself in to the police. His teacher Esther Fontanel tries to understand the events in retrospect. But as the journal’s addressee, she is increasingly targeted by the police herself.

The prison in Volterra, Tuscany, is home to a unique artistic practice: It is within these walls that Armando Punzo, shut away for three decades with men serving long sentences, has created his plays.

This coming-of-age drama deals with a young man, realizing who he really is and which things he will never do...

Five days before D-Day, the day of the last voyage of the Order of Sirius, a sect nestled in the Vaudoise Alps, Switzerland. Five days during which a community of 48 people, women, men, children, fed with esotericism and guided by a narcissistic guru, will test their faith and be deprived of their identity. Five days in which every gesture will be the last. Sirius is inspired by the massacre of the Order of the Solar Temple in 1994 in western Switzerland.

Is it possible to replicate the human brain on a computer? To connect it to machines? Research aimed at understanding the functioning of our biological brain is being matched by spectacular progress in the development of artificial intelligence.

A view of the religious tensions between Muslims and Buddhist through the portrait of the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, leader of anti-Muslim movement in Myanmar.

In a moment of anger in a grocery store in Lausanne, a father loses patience and disciplines his disobedient child. A shocked customer immediately intervenes to express her concern. Other customers join the conversation and the discussion soon turns into a debate that gradually gets out of hand.

As winter sets in and P.A. sees the world shifting around him, he starts to observe strange phenomena in the environment. The changes are imperceptible at first, but gradually his whole world seems to be on the brink.

Seventeen-year-old Mathieu Reymond lies brutally battered and raped in a field of reeds. It is only after his release from hospital that the memories come back, unannounced and fragmentary, but still so precise that regular meetings with two police officers not only allow the perpetrator’s identikit image to take shape, but also the chronology of the crime itself.

A behind-the-scenes look at the of how the Paris Opera is run under the direction of Stephane Lissner.

Two imprisoned brothers, with no dreams or realities, seek a bit of air to breathe. What must die suffocates. What wishes to live hopes. A tunnel opens in front of them. They fall into it, sink into it, forget themselves. A light envelops them, then eternity.

Claude Goretta directed “L'invitation” in 1973. For filmmaker Lionel Baier, born in 1975, it is like a “travelling companion”, to adapt Serge Daney’s expression. He feels it is definitive proof that a Swiss can be deeply Chekhovian. The young filmmaker goes to Geneva to ask his elder how he achieved the whoosh of water effect in the film, why attention to detail matters so much, and how to film great actors such as François Simon. This encounter with Claude Goretta – but also with Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, Michel Robin and Frédérique Meininger – leads one of the greatest of Swiss filmmakers to open up about his work.