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Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid died on August 5, 2006, and German filmmaker Werner Schroeter on April 12, 2010. They were close friends, and along with Jean Eustache, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Philippe Garrel were the most innovative filmmakers of the post-New Wave era.
Schaub and Schindelm’s documentary follows two Swiss star architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, on two very different projects: the national stadium for the Olympic summer games in Peking 2008 and a city area in the provincial town of Jinhua, China.
Finally adult and free? You wish! His father sees him as a future boss of the family-owned printing firm and his mother only wants the best for him. Sebastian can’t take it any more. On his eighteenth birthday he announces his departure to Geneva to work as an au pair in a family, looking after children and doing the household chores. To improve his French, of course! His father flips his lid, his mother is distraught. Only his sister Kathrin thinks her little brother is really cool… Very few men would be up to the challenge!
In Japanese theater, women's roles are traditionally played by men. The man playing the woman's role, the Onnagata, does not imitate the woman, as in the West, but tries to capture her significance. He need not stick close to his model, but draws far more from his own identity - a shift of value takes place, which is nonetheless not a step beyond. THE WRITTEN FACE is an attempt to offer an insight into the Japanese Kabuki star Tamasaburo Bando, one of the last defenders of this ancient and disappearing performing tradition.
Set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de Watteville. Schmid 's favorite axiom, that love is projection, never had such a thorough airing. Is Clothilde really the wife of a French official now holed up in Siberia? Or is she Hecate, goddess of black magic and devourer of the Arab boys she meets far from the European quarter? Only our projections know for sure; for the rest, she is a "woman looking out into the night." Drawn from a novel by Paul Morand, who based the main character on his wife Helene, Schmid's film achieves an atmosphere of magic in which psychological credibility is not so much absent as irrelevant-a film that distances itself from the drama it invokes, perhaps as the elusive Clothilde turns her back on the madness she provokes.
Documentary account of a man’s life in the face of imminent death – Francisco Varela's story told affectionately and gently, touchingly and astutely. Varela spent his life building bridges: between Western science and Eastern wisdom, neurobiology and philosophy, abstract theory and practical life. This film seeks to deconstructs the prevailing division between science and art.
This romantic drama follows two policemen whose job is to investigate the lives of foreigners who have applied for Swiss citizenship. Among the applicants they must screen are a French psychiatrist and his wife, and a ballet dancer. The married couple are quickly accepted, but the dancer's life offers some objections. However, since the younger policeman has fallen in love with her, there is a chance that she, too, will win Swiss citizenship.
Memoirs of the Italian Opera by the singers and musicians of the Casa Verdi, Milan, the world’s first nursing home for retired opera singers, founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. This documentary, which has achieved cult-like status among opera and music lovers, features former singers who reminisce about their careers and their past operatic roles.
The formerly great Swiss hotel which Valentin’s family owned when he was a boy has been emptied and is about to be torn down. He revisits the magical site’s empty halls and ballrooms.
To salve his guilty conscience an elder brother removes his disturbed younger sibling from a mental institution after a suicide attempt and tries to bring him back to mental competency through one on one contact. Free of the institution he continues to be haunted by dreams of a lost twin and chants the eerie phrase "Do I stand before the king?" It is the elder brother that seems doomed to lose himself in his brother's insanity.
A documentary film about Tibetan traditional medicine.