Documentaries

This documentary takes a multi-layered approach to Saint Nicholas of Flüe. Rare witness accounts and quotations from his transmitted mystical texts, in particular the vision of the tower and the fountain, paint a portrait of a multifaceted and historically significant personality. Restored version.

The Swiss artist Markus Raetz is an established figure in the international art world. For the film by Iwan Schumacher, the artist from Bern is for the first time giving a camera team an insight into his 40 years of work.

The 36-year-old Swiss artist Urs Fischer, who lives in New York, has been enjoying international fame for some years now. This documentary follows him during the preparation of his exclusive exhibition in an American museum and thus takes us into the daily life and work of an artist.

Cuno Amiet lived from 1868-1961, yet seen today many of his pictures have a contemporary edge. Amiet was a Swiss pioneer of modern painting along with Ferdinand Hodler and Giovanni Giacometti. The film visits three highly individual Amiet collectors in Dallas, Geneva and Studen, near Biel. Surrounded by Amiet’s works they tell us what part these paintings play in their lives.

This documentary is a poetic journey to the unique music of the Argentine maestro Eduardo Falú (1923 - 2013). At the same time it is a vivid portrait of this outstanding musician. Starting from his particular relationship with the landscapes of northwestern Argentina, with his beloved hometown Salta, with the vast plains of the Pampa, the enormous mountains of the Andes with their dramatic canyons, fertile valleys and deserted high plateaus, the film follows the manyfold stations of Falús life and career.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is arguably the world's most reknowned expert on the process of dying. With Kübler Ross' full collaboration, Haupt's film looks back on her life and career, from her earliest days as a triplet in 1920s Zurich, to her fame as an international lecturer and writer based in the US. Now in her twilight years, Kübler-Ross is bedbound in Arizona, and awaiting death herself. A truly fascinating film that enables us to re-evaluate our own emotions regarding life's greatest certainty, death. With the addition of archive film and interviews with Kübler-Ross' sisters and close colleagues, Haupt builds up a rich picture of a remarkable woman who has done so much to make death less of a taboo.

One of the world’s greatest living painters, the German artist Gerhard Richter has spent over half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises and mass media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. Infamously media-shy, he agreed to appear on camera for the first time in 15 years for a 2007 short by filmmaker Corinna Belz called Gerhard Richter’s Window. Her follow-up, Gerhard Richter Painting, is exactly that: a thrilling document of Richter’s creative process, juxtaposed with intimate conversations (with his critics, his collaborators, and his American gallerist Marian Goodman) and rare archive material. From our fly-on-the-wall perspective, we watch the 79-year-old create a series of large-scale abstract canvasses, using fat brushes and a massive squeegee to apply (and then scrape off) layer after layer of brightly colored paint. This mesmerizing footage, of a highly charged process of creation and destruction, turns Belz’s portrait of an artist into a work of art itself.

Ken Bugul is a Senegalese writer who lives in Africa, where her soul is anchored. She has had an exceptional life. Silvia Voser’s film shows her as an iconic figure of the female condition and of relationships between Africa and the West. Ken Bugul is considered one of the most brilliant writers in Senegalese and French of these past decades. Over the years, thanks to her great command of the French language and the uncompromising care she takes with the wording of the meaning of Wolof vocabulary, her mother tongue, her novels have become absolute references in the realm of linguistic studies. "What you read in French in my novels is how we think and speak in Wolof in my village". Ken Bugul’s personal story is overshadowed by Africa’s turbulent history. She was born in 1947 in an isolated village in Senegal, at that time a French colony. Her father was 85 years old and her mother left them before Ken turned five. This was a fundamental event in Ken Bugul’s life. In spite of lacking a mother’s love, she was full of energy and a yearning for freedom, and she received an exceptional education for a village girl of that time. In 1971, she left for Europe to go to university and there she met people from the upper middle class and discovered new ideologies and liberties, modern art, drugs, alcohol, loneliness, incomprehension and disdain, and prostitution to relieve her need for affection. As she says in "The Abandoned Baobab": "For twenty years all I had learned was their thoughts and their emotions. I thought I’d have fun with them, but I ended up even more frustrated. I identified with them, but they didn’t identify with me." She came back to Senegal, a broken, lonely and penniless young woman. People thought she was crazy and she was rejected by her family and society. For two years, she slept in the streets of Dakar, hanging out with outcasts, beggars, prostitutes and artists. Dirty, hungry, almost naked, she started writing her first novel, "The Abandoned Baobab". Worn out, she decided to go back to her family. And there, in her mother’s village, she found refuge with the Serigne (marabout), a wise and much respected man. He took her as his 28th wife, enabling her to re-enter society, and he supported her in her desire to write and to be free. He died in 1981, a year before the publication of her first novel, "The Abandoned Baobab", which was an immediate success. Ken Bugul was invited to present her book all over the world. She met a doctor from Benin, married him and moved to that country, where she gave birth to their daughter Yasmina. Her husband passed away four years later. For the past thirty years, novel after novel, Ken Bugul has painted a picture of her life as a woman, of her loves, of the relationship between her continent and the West. "To write", she says, "is to dazzle the senses, and the senses are colourless." Silvia Voser leads us gently into the secret, tormented world of an artist whose writings show an understanding of the world that is rarely achieved.

The only thing more outrageous than the great artist Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs was his life. Born in a suburb of New York, he began to take highly aesthetic images of sexually excited men in his mid twenties. It is the era of Andy Warhol’s Factory and a new dawn of hedonistic sexuality. In MAPPLETHORPE: LOOK AT THE PICTURES, the well-known homosexual tells without shame about the passions that influenced his art. Intimate recollections by those who knew him cast additional, sometimes critical, light on the biography of an artist whose provocative subject matter begged the question as to where art ends and pornography begins. Filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato receive unprecedented access to previously unpublished archive material and shine a new light on a key figure of 20th century photography.

A three-year journey with actor Bruno Ganz. He plays various roles in various places, but he also plays Bruno Ganz – filming and directing friends. Again and again he works on the role of Dr. Faust, the figure who – speaking for us all – desperately wants to discover “what holds the world together at the core”. A thousand days of searching for one's own destiny, with despair as the only companion, and placing hope in the creative power of poetry.

To celebrate the centenary of Jorge Luis Borges' birth, Tristán Bauer has created a very stimulating film essay: Skilfully, respectfully and poetically, he mixes archive documents, conversations and photographs of the writer's life, which reflect Borges' political stance, his problems with the Perón regime and his international successes. Tristán Bauer does not limit himself to a historian's work, he subtly reconstructs the writer's world: infinite fountains of the strange library of Babel, numerous corridors, circles, mirrors, stairs and hexagons.

Croatia, January 1992. In the midst of the Yugoslav Wars, Chris, a young Swiss journalist is found dead in mysterious circumstances. He was wearing the uniform of an international mercenary group. Anja Kofmel was his cousin. As a little girl, she used to admire this handsome young man; now a grown-up woman, she decides to investigate his story, trying to understand what really was the involvement of Chris in the conflict

Margreet Honig, eighty-four years old, is an internationally sought-after Dutch singing teacher. She teaches all over Europe and works with world-famous singers. She has developed her very own way of working, which is a pleasant contrast to the usual music education, which is fixated on perfection and performance. Her approach is therefore highly topical, also in relation to social changes in the areas of education and pedagogy.

Propelled from society by tragic turns, the people of Darwin (population 35) must now find ways to coexist in a place without a government, a church, jobs, or children. The near-ghost town's survival depends on a fragile, gravity-fed waterline that descends from the mountains where top secret weapons are being tested. One "accidental" drop of a bomb, they half-joke, could wipe out their entire town. "Darwin" is a documentary film de Nick Brandestini about an isolated community at the end of a weathered road in Death Valley, California, and tells the story of a uniquely American place and yet a place that is unique even within America.

On the barrier island of Sapelo, two young brothers are growing up in the last remaining enclave of the Saltwater Geechee people. Their greatest joy is exploring the wilderness like their adoptive mother, Cornelia Walker Bailey, did as a child. As Sapelo’s storyteller and elder matriarch, she works to preserve what remains of this island community established by her ancestors. At the dawn of adolescence, the brothers inherit her hope, but their bond is tested as they begin to face the wider world. The documentary by Nick Brandestini was awarded the Sesterce d'or for Best Feature Film at Visions du Réel 2020.

Coming of age in Barrow, Alaska - the northernmost community of the United States - has become a little more complicated for the local youth than it was for their ancestors who originally named this place “Ukpiagvik” (“where we hunt snowy owls”). They are the twenty-first century descendants of a culture that has endured for millennia on this isolated, but rapidly changing tundra. The harvest of the agvik (bowhead whale) remains the heart of their culture. "Children of the Arctic" is a year-in-the-life portrait of Native Alaskan teenagers navigating between both being modern American teenagers and the inheritors of an endangered culture.

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.” Einstein. All over the world bees have been dying for the past three years. Although the causes for this are still a mystery, one thing is already clear: there is more at stake than simply a few dead insects, and a great deal more than just honey. Seeking answers, the film embarks on a journey to meet with people whose lives depend on bees: to a Swiss beekeeper living on an Alp; to the gigantic almond plantations in California; to a bee brain researcher in Berlin; to a pollen trader in China; and to the killer bees in the Arizona desert. All report on how the bees are vanishing. The film tells us about their lives. And about ours.

On the final journey back from high in the Andes down to the Amazon jungle, the director remains haunted by the film she has just completed about the Huaorani Indians and the anthropologist Laura Rival. A farewell to this alien people, strange and unfathomable, but also to her own people who are no easier to understand – the white helpers, researchers, filmmakers… Destroyers?

Stations are islands, detached between worlds and times, cosmopolitan meeting points and junctions. "Mahatah - Side Stories from Main Stations" plunges us into this world where, almost without realising it, people scrub the stairs, set up the train compositions, look after security and sell tickets - or kebabs.

Boobs. Melons. Bazookas: American director Kristen Vermilyea has large breasts, neck pain, back pain and balance issues.
 Her decision to get a reduction triggers questions about identity, aging and bodies. Kristen departs on a series of wacky and humorous adventures before going under the knife.

After 40 years Alain Tanner again travels to the port of Genoa, where he worked for a shipping company as a 22-year-old. On the back of his own memories he depicts the rough world of the dockworkers, another of those trades that has undergone fundamental changes as a result of recessions, modernisation and liberalisation. “The visual impression of the harbour and the city has changed very little, but what goes on there nowadays is completely different. The city is still as beautiful and alien and somewhat sad as before. But the port is dying, like so many other major ports. In Genoa, as elsewhere in Italy, the economic, social and political climate is highly explosive. But you also feel that things are in flow and the country is on the verge of some far-reaching changes. In this film I wanted to explore my own memories of Genoa, uncover its present and guess at its future. Genoa, this beautiful, this sad, this alien town has become for me a metaphor for society in change.”

In 2009 the body of Alice B is found washed up on an African beach. Next to the corpse of the white, 30-year old European woman lie those of a dozen black migrants. Eight years after this tragedy, Pierre-Alain Meier travels to Senegal in the hope of understanding the story behind this shipwreck. When he was Alice’s age, he wandered the streets of Dakar planning the production of the film Hyenas. Like her, he was a white person in Africa. Perhaps like her, he would hoped he could blend in a bit more with his African friends and co-workers and not be so unmistakeably foreign. Following in Alice’s footsteps, the filmmaker today puts his own story into perspective, with humility and affection, allowing us access to a very intimate terrain. Farewell to Africa tells the story of a final journey and sets out to explore the complex ties – both rich and asymmetrical – that have never ceased to exist between Europe and French-speaking Africa. (Luciano Barisone)

The Future Circular Collider is the machine of the future. Thanks to it, we will finally be able to go back in time to the origin of our universe. But which way do we go to set up the largest scientific instrument of all time? Between metaphysics and underground tunnels, a story of the preparations or how men are ready to move mountains for more knowledge.

The film begins with a volcanic eruption that stranded the director, Pauline Julier, in a foreign city, among strangers. In turns, these strangers evoke legends about the formation of the continents, the blooming of the tectonic plates or the explosion of ash that provoked summers without sun.

Photo?, the clown calls the public from the ring of the circus. The delicious number like the even more famous soap bubble number and other Pic classics can be enjoyed in "Le Cirque de Pic". They form the heart of Thomas Ott's affectionate portrait film. Emil Steinberger tells how he was enthusiastic about Pic from the beginning and how he recommended the clown from St.Gallen to the Roncalli Circus director. Ott reviews Pic's career. Pic himself tells how varied and romantic the spartan life in the circus caravan was. Photos show that the subtle art of the clown cannot be separated from the person Richard Hirzel, who knows how to enchant with his empathic poetry. The portrait closes with scenes from the current programme "Comical Bones", in which Pic shines as the narrator. It is Emil once again who praises Pic's subtle and expressive facial expressions.

The movie recalls children who suffered mental and physical harm both during the last century, particularly in religious orphanages, and during the time of early modernperiod witch-hunts. It shows that the mindsets and behavioural patterns of both time periods are more alike than one might think.

Cuno Amiet lived from 1868-1961, yet seen today many of his pictures have a contemporary edge. Amiet was a Swiss pioneer of modern painting along with Ferdinand Hodler and Giovanni Giacometti. The film visits three highly individual Amiet collectors in Dallas, Geneva and Studen, near Biel. Surrounded by Amiet’s works they tell us what part these paintings play in their lives.

A film about people who have fought for more freedom and justice – and have had to pay dearly for it. The two women and two men from Tibet, Congo, Chile, and Turkey now live in Switzerland. In their native countries they were badly tortured for their human rights efforts. Nevertheless, they have not lost their belief in a better world.

This documentary takes a multi-layered approach to Saint Nicholas of Flüe. Rare witness accounts and quotations from his transmitted mystical texts, in particular the vision of the tower and the fountain, paint a portrait of a multifaceted and historically significant personality. Restored version.

A documentary film about Swiss musician and singer/songwriter Stephan Eicher, his Yéniche roots and the history and persecution of the Yéniche people in Switzerland and their links to Swiss music.

Bombs, war, angry bearded men, shrouded sobbing women, shattered cities: Iraq, as seen through the eyes of the western media these days. These images are juxtaposed with those from the fifties and seventies: films with frivolous music, unveiled women who study; elegantly dressed men in Bagdad, a modern city. How did it come to this? Film director Samir tells the story of his globalised middle-class Iraqi family, scattered between Auckland, Moscow, Paris, London and Buffalo, New York.

In 1976 a massive explosion at chemicals factory Icmesa in the Italian Seveso had devastating consequences for neighbouring communities and their environment. Icmesa’s parent company was Givaudan, which in turn belonged to Hoffman La Roche, based in Basel. Following the accident, Icmesa’s technical director Jorg Sambeth was charged with failing to keep adequate security measures. During his investigations into the true cause and background to the catastrophe, Sambeth stumbled upon facts that were damaging to those who were paying his lawyers. Yet he is sentenced to five years in prison. How should he take up his grievances with this conglomerate of companies?

Daniele von Arb was 16 years old in 1970 when he and his friends founded the revolutionary cell in Zurich later listed by the U.S. secret service CIA in its chart on international terrorism under the code name “Annebäbi”. Today he is a fortune-teller and future consultant. A hurtling journey through the armed struggle of the 1970s, entry into the cosmos of spirituality and finally, in 1989, a first class ticket to freedom.

An ethnographic documentary film in three movements, along the lines of a symphony. The three movements reflect the three differing stages of development co-existing within the mountainous canton. In Göschenen, at the foot of the Gotthard, which straddles Europe’s North-South axis, industrialization took hold long ago, and the mountain farmers of old now work in offices and factories. In the Schächtental, however, the traditional family-centric mountain economy survives. Meanwhile, the village of Bristen in the Maderanertal is in the throes of upheaval: while the traditional farming communities still exist, nigh on 250 inhabitants leave the area daily to go to work or school.

The Swiss artist Markus Raetz is an established figure in the international art world. For the film by Iwan Schumacher, the artist from Bern is for the first time giving a camera team an insight into his 40 years of work.

A three-year journey with actor Bruno Ganz. He plays various roles in various places, but he also plays Bruno Ganz – filming and directing friends. Again and again he works on the role of Dr. Faust, the figure who – speaking for us all – desperately wants to discover “what holds the world together at the core”. A thousand days of searching for one's own destiny, with despair as the only companion, and placing hope in the creative power of poetry.

The Kempf family lives on three different farms at different altitudes in the Schächen Valley in the Canton of URI. ten times a year they move from farm to farm with their livestock: up the mountain in the spring, down to the valley in autumn – and then up again in winter to farm their called “Pfaffen”, at an altitude of 1725 meters above sea level. This is where they feed their livestock the hav they have collected from the steep alpine slopes during the summer. The film is an intimate portrait of a family, with who the farmer's grandparents and his sister also live. Over the course of the year, the film director and the family developed a close relationship, close enough to render visible the problems of modern times in conjunction with this archaic lifestyle, problems which the farmers refuse to let get them down.

The experiment is a journey through the remotest time and on the smallest scale that we can imagine: an exploration of matter about one millionth of a second following the Big Bang that generated our universe. As the new experiment at CERN proceeds in its exploration of the mysterious energy that animates the universe, scientists and artists guide us towards the shadow line where science and art, in different ways, pursue truth and beauty. Some of these men and women believe in god, while others believe only in experiment and doubt. But in their search for truth they are all alert to an elusive sixth – or seventh – sense… the sense of beauty.

The Swiss National Association for the Storage of Radioactive Waste plans to build a permanent waste disposal site in Wellenberg, Canton of Nidwalden. A regional citizens’ action group is formed to protest against it. Murer not only interviews supporters and opponents, in particular the Alpine farmers living on the Wellenberg. He starts by raising the question of a time-scale that is out of all proportion to the human lifespan as a measure of time. Fredi Murer dedicated the film to the “children and children’s children”, both of the farmers on the Wellenberg and of all of us. For the first time, Murer deals explicitly with the ‘can-do’ generation that lives and works as though they were the last people on this earth.

At the far end of Alaska, filmmaker Roman Droux fulfils a dream and travels to the land of grizzly bears together with bear researcher David Bittner. The two adventurers set off for the realm of the bears to a place where there is no trace of human civilization. Surrounded by crystal-clear torrents, they experience the care of a mother bear and impressive battles of giant male bears. Roman Droux brings pictures of breathtaking beauty to the big screen. A lively nature film for the whole family.

The internet has changed everything, also for journalism: business models are falling by the wayside, news is available for free, anywhere and at any time. I accompany journalists in their daily lives, see how they struggle, and I do what they also do: I observe and ask, also question myself, my fascination and my suspicion. I, too, use the net with ease. I am a user – and I am used.

Alphonse lives as a recluse on an Alp. Mother Nature provides him with everything he needs, and being able to live in the present is a gift for him. Monika’s attitude towards time has become serene since her near-death experience. She no longer has a fear of death, which is also sensed by the dementia patients she treats. Sam, a forester, sees the deceased. In his opinion, death only occurs on a physical level. For the Capuchin monks in Schwyz, death and dying are part of everyday life, also for Eugen, a monk and artist in Engelberg who has administered terminal care for more than thirty fellow brothers.

In 1944, four-year-old Argyris Sfountouris survived a brutal massacre committed by the German occupying forces, in which he lost his parents and thirty more relatives. The Greek orphan was sent to the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, Switzerland and obtained a Ph.D in maths and astrophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Now a 66-year-old man of winning charm and melancholy cheerfulness, Argyris has forever been tackling the horror he had to go through as a little boy. He has not tried to come to terms with it emotionally. Rather, he has tried to learn to live with it and to do his utmost to prevent it from happening again. An intimate, reflective film about the quest for peace and the almost insurmountable difficulties linked to true reconciliation – an open-ended journey.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is arguably the world's most reknowned expert on the process of dying. With Kübler Ross' full collaboration, Haupt's film looks back on her life and career, from her earliest days as a triplet in 1920s Zurich, to her fame as an international lecturer and writer based in the US. Now in her twilight years, Kübler-Ross is bedbound in Arizona, and awaiting death herself. A truly fascinating film that enables us to re-evaluate our own emotions regarding life's greatest certainty, death. With the addition of archive film and interviews with Kübler-Ross' sisters and close colleagues, Haupt builds up a rich picture of a remarkable woman who has done so much to make death less of a taboo.

In the “Kunstgiesserei” in St. Gallen renowned artists – such as Urs Fischer, Katharina Fritsch, Peter Fischli, Mariana Castillio Deball, Paul McCarthy, Alex Hanimann and Hans Josephsohn – meet up with Felix Lehner, the charismatic founder of the art foundry. He and his crew translate ideas into sculptures with a great deal of passion and enthusiasm. Their success has led to the fact that some of the production phases had to be outsourced to Shanghai. The cultural and artisanal exchange with China is tremendously enriching. And regardless of whether in Shanghai or St. Gallen, the molten metal is spellbinding as it turns dreams into reality.

Nowadays, the wish to have children ranges between legitimate desires, primary instincts, social pressures and lifestyle choices. With a great deal of expert knowledge and impressive pictures, the film takes a candid look at reproductive medicine and its industry, as well as into the test tube. The point is, however, not to praise or stigmatise reproductive medicine. Nevertheless, the social, political and, above all, ethical implications are palpable at all times. A present-day science fiction.

«Ailo's Journey» tells the fight for the survival of a small wild reindeer, frail and vulnerable to the challenges that punctuate his first year. Its awakening to the wild world is a real tale in the heart of the grandiose landscapes of Lapland.

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.” Einstein. All over the world bees have been dying for the past three years. Although the causes for this are still a mystery, one thing is already clear: there is more at stake than simply a few dead insects, and a great deal more than just honey. Seeking answers, the film embarks on a journey to meet with people whose lives depend on bees: to a Swiss beekeeper living on an Alp; to the gigantic almond plantations in California; to a bee brain researcher in Berlin; to a pollen trader in China; and to the killer bees in the Arizona desert. All report on how the bees are vanishing. The film tells us about their lives. And about ours.

In 1976 a massive explosion at chemicals factory Icmesa in the Italian Seveso had devastating consequences for neighbouring communities and their environment. Icmesa’s parent company was Givaudan, which in turn belonged to Hoffman La Roche, based in Basel. Following the accident, Icmesa’s technical director Jorg Sambeth was charged with failing to keep adequate security measures. During his investigations into the true cause and background to the catastrophe, Sambeth stumbled upon facts that were damaging to those who were paying his lawyers. Yet he is sentenced to five years in prison. How should he take up his grievances with this conglomerate of companies?

In a world of one-way traffic, where the northern countries are exporting their economic and political model worldwide, one country in Latin America has undertaken a profound reform of these models to invent a new type of governance, both pragmatic and humanistic. The country in question is Ecuador. Rafael Correa, an established economist, who came to politics as a man on a mission, was elected President in 2006. Since coming to power, he has transformed a country with archaic structures into a social, independent, ecological and participative democracy. He has given Ecuadorians genuine reason to believe that the rigid structures of the past were no longer inevitable, that ordinary citizens had their word to say, and that, at long last, their voices would be heard. This film is intended for everyone, from rich and emerging countries alike. It suggests concrete perspectives to a new way of living the phenomenon of globalization. It shows that political, ecological and economic alternatives do exist. This film is not a film about Ecuador; rather, is about a political project, where utopia became reality. It is a film of ideas and reflections, suggesting solutions to the current crises besetting the globe. It proposes a real debate on the future of our society

At the far end of Alaska, filmmaker Roman Droux fulfils a dream and travels to the land of grizzly bears together with bear researcher David Bittner. The two adventurers set off for the realm of the bears to a place where there is no trace of human civilization. Surrounded by crystal-clear torrents, they experience the care of a mother bear and impressive battles of giant male bears. Roman Droux brings pictures of breathtaking beauty to the big screen. A lively nature film for the whole family.

A man wanders through the 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the stricken nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The cherry trees are in bloom and the natural surroundings make an idyllic impression. Radiation is invisible, yet a gaping emptiness looms where the tsunami engulfed streets and houses. The man is wearing normal clothing, just like the people still toughing it out here, for the time being at least. He occa- sionally encounters white "ghosts" in protective clothing, performing strange tasks. As in Tarkovsky’s STALKER, the zone in Fujiwara Toshi’s NO MAN’S ZONE is both a place and a mental state. A gradual disintegration began long before the destruction and devastation, a process defied for the most part by the old people our "Stalker" encounters. A voice accom- panies the filmmaker’s wanderings, that of Armenian-Canadian actress Arsinée Khanjian, a voice from a place of exile, unfamiliar and sympathetic. NO MAN’S ZONE is a complex reflection on the relationship between images and fears, on being addicted to the apocalypse, on the ravaged relationship between man and nature. For the zone to be decontam- inated and returned to the people, nature itself will have to undergo an amputation.

Once amongst avid admirers of nuclear plants and their managers, Aunt Kuniko and her community are on the verge of disintegration in the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe. Director Kyoko Miyake, having lived outside of Japan for more than a decade, revisits Fukushima.

The mountain massif of Cutucú in the south of the Amazon region in Ecuador was a kind of defense against the environmental destruction for the native population but in the same time an obstacle. The people had no access to the modern world outside. The road through the Cutucú now allows mobility in order to exploit the fossil resurces but it grants the natives a way to reach the so called civilized world. The process happens in an unspectacular way. Where progress starts it cannot be stopped anymore: Escavating, digging, shovelling, grubbing, selling and buying: everyday madness. Excerpts from the film «Shuar, People of the Sacred Waterfalls» (1986) recall us, how in the traditional culture of the Shuar nature was an integrated part of life and mobility was achieved in the hallucinogenic ecstasy with no bounds. Today the natives are transporting wooden boards with horses to civilization. Wood is the fastest business, other products must first be created. Now the jungle disappears in everyday madness.

Wild Plants are plants that seed themselves on fallow land, take possession of seemingly uninhabitable terrain and create new habitats. But wild plants are also people who create their own utopias and become impulse generators for others. People live in many scattered places around the world and projects are growing in which botanical and biographical uncontrolled growth are combined.

Bombs, war, angry bearded men, shrouded sobbing women, shattered cities: Iraq, as seen through the eyes of the western media these days. These images are juxtaposed with those from the fifties and seventies: films with frivolous music, unveiled women who study; elegantly dressed men in Bagdad, a modern city. How did it come to this? Film director Samir tells the story of his globalised middle-class Iraqi family, scattered between Auckland, Moscow, Paris, London and Buffalo, New York.

In 1944, four-year-old Argyris Sfountouris survived a brutal massacre committed by the German occupying forces, in which he lost his parents and thirty more relatives. The Greek orphan was sent to the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, Switzerland and obtained a Ph.D in maths and astrophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Now a 66-year-old man of winning charm and melancholy cheerfulness, Argyris has forever been tackling the horror he had to go through as a little boy. He has not tried to come to terms with it emotionally. Rather, he has tried to learn to live with it and to do his utmost to prevent it from happening again. An intimate, reflective film about the quest for peace and the almost insurmountable difficulties linked to true reconciliation – an open-ended journey.

MAIDAN chronicles the civil uprising against the regime of president Yanukovych that took place in Kiev (Ukraine) in the winter of 2013/14. The film follows the progress of the revolution: from peaceful rallies, half a million strong, in the Maidan square, to the bloody street battles between protestors and riot police. MAIDAN is a portrait of an awakening nation, rediscovering its identity.

A film about people who have fought for more freedom and justice – and have had to pay dearly for it. The two women and two men from Tibet, Congo, Chile, and Turkey now live in Switzerland. In their native countries they were badly tortured for their human rights efforts. Nevertheless, they have not lost their belief in a better world.

Beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker Anders Østergaard, brings us close to Burma’s video journalists who insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country despite risking torture and life in jail. Armed with small handycams they make their undercover reportages, smuggle the material out of the country, and broadcast back into Burma via satellite or offered as free usage for international media.

After the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983, successive democratic governments launched a series of reforms purporting to turn Argentina into the world's most liberal and prosperous economy. Less than twenty years later, the Argentinians have lost literally everything: major national companies have been sold well below value to foreign corporations; the proceeds of privatizations have been diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials; revised labour laws have taken away all rights from employees; in a country that is traditionally an important exporter of foodstuffs, malnutrition is widespread; millions of people are unemployed and sinking into poverty; and their savings have disappeared in a final banking collapse. The film highlights numerous political, financial, social and judicial aspects that mark out Argentina's road to ruin.

No Apologies describes the state of physical and mental siege of black people living in precarious conditions in Lausanne. Confronted with the need to protect anonymity and the impossibility of filming in the street, No Apologies was conceived in a way that allows its characters to express themselves freely. Masked or barefaced, they bear witness to their personal journey, their struggle for everyday survival and police brutality. Thus questioning their place in a Swiss society that considers them as pariahs. The film is a collective project resulting from an alliance between the people directly affected by these issues and movie professionals. Given the urgency of the situation, the documentary was produced in very little time, in guerrilla mode without the constraints of institutional funding.

This Charlie Hebdo staffer is being filmed since 2011, when the young Moroccan journalist came to France as she couldn't work in her own country anymore. We follow Zineb El Rhazoui before, during and after the attack on the satire magazine in Paris. From being a censored journalist she becomes the most protected woman of Europe. Never afraid, but then she falls in love and gets pregnant. What now?

The entire world praised the military and Aung San Suu Kyi, when power was passed on to the democracy icon after 50 years of military dictatorship. One year later she defended an ethnic cleansing and had isolated herself from the public. This film tells you why. It’s the story of how power struggles unfold and how political enemies can end up being closer than the ones they claim to fight for: the people.

Bethlehem is a neighbourhood in the city of Bern where immigrants from over 30 nations have settled. At the centre of this film is the junior team of the Bethlehem Football Club. In this team, the majority are immigrants between 15 and 16 years old. The film also portrays - along with football - their everyday lives at school, vocational training and leisure time. It questions the protagonists about their self-image, their dreams, worries and fears, asks them about what connects them and what divides them, about what it’s like to be a foreigner in their former homeland and how they get along in another foreign environment.

More than 500 000 Italians live and work in Switzerland. They are considered a „problem“. An over-employed economy needs their labour – a small nation of distinct peculiarity perceives them as foreign objects. They live beyond the barrier of a different language. Discussed as a problem, they remain unknown as human beings.

Nowadays, the wish to have children ranges between legitimate desires, primary instincts, social pressures and lifestyle choices. With a great deal of expert knowledge and impressive pictures, the film takes a candid look at reproductive medicine and its industry, as well as into the test tube. The point is, however, not to praise or stigmatise reproductive medicine. Nevertheless, the social, political and, above all, ethical implications are palpable at all times. A present-day science fiction.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is arguably the world's most reknowned expert on the process of dying. With Kübler Ross' full collaboration, Haupt's film looks back on her life and career, from her earliest days as a triplet in 1920s Zurich, to her fame as an international lecturer and writer based in the US. Now in her twilight years, Kübler-Ross is bedbound in Arizona, and awaiting death herself. A truly fascinating film that enables us to re-evaluate our own emotions regarding life's greatest certainty, death. With the addition of archive film and interviews with Kübler-Ross' sisters and close colleagues, Haupt builds up a rich picture of a remarkable woman who has done so much to make death less of a taboo.

The experiment is a journey through the remotest time and on the smallest scale that we can imagine: an exploration of matter about one millionth of a second following the Big Bang that generated our universe. As the new experiment at CERN proceeds in its exploration of the mysterious energy that animates the universe, scientists and artists guide us towards the shadow line where science and art, in different ways, pursue truth and beauty. Some of these men and women believe in god, while others believe only in experiment and doubt. But in their search for truth they are all alert to an elusive sixth – or seventh – sense… the sense of beauty.

Ghana is considered a model country in West Africa - democratic, open, ambitious. Ghana's government is proud and likes to refer to good governance: to the best rule of law in West Africa and above all to stable economic growth - despite the global financial crisis. The government is determined to achieve faster socio-economic development, especially by expanding the industrial sector. Ebenezer Mireku comes from a Ghanaian jungle village. He made some detours to obtain his doctorate at the University of St. Gallen in 1988 and then returned to his home country to apply the knowledge he had acquired as an entrepreneur. For several years he has been passionately fighting for the realisation of his major project: the construction of a new section of the Ghanaian railway. The railway line is intended to stimulate the development of the entire region. His future-oriented, gigantic railway project was at the centre of the film project and is the leitmotif of Bruno Moll's film Take Off. The film narrative follows Ebenezer Mirekus' biography and experiences with the railway project, documenting encounters with Ghanaians. Questions about development, growth and progress are of specific interest.

At the far end of Alaska, filmmaker Roman Droux fulfils a dream and travels to the land of grizzly bears together with bear researcher David Bittner. The two adventurers set off for the realm of the bears to a place where there is no trace of human civilization. Surrounded by crystal-clear torrents, they experience the care of a mother bear and impressive battles of giant male bears. Roman Droux brings pictures of breathtaking beauty to the big screen. A lively nature film for the whole family.

Is it possible to talk with animals? The filmmaker explores the world of animal communication. She wants to understand her excited dog Bina. On her international journey she meets two horse teachers, an animal communicator, a biologist, an animal therapist and the founder of The Trust Technique. Salome discovers astonishing possibilities of animal communication, whether it's with her dog Bina, other dogs, horses, cats, dolphins, or a goat.

A man wanders through the 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the stricken nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The cherry trees are in bloom and the natural surroundings make an idyllic impression. Radiation is invisible, yet a gaping emptiness looms where the tsunami engulfed streets and houses. The man is wearing normal clothing, just like the people still toughing it out here, for the time being at least. He occa- sionally encounters white "ghosts" in protective clothing, performing strange tasks. As in Tarkovsky’s STALKER, the zone in Fujiwara Toshi’s NO MAN’S ZONE is both a place and a mental state. A gradual disintegration began long before the destruction and devastation, a process defied for the most part by the old people our "Stalker" encounters. A voice accom- panies the filmmaker’s wanderings, that of Armenian-Canadian actress Arsinée Khanjian, a voice from a place of exile, unfamiliar and sympathetic. NO MAN’S ZONE is a complex reflection on the relationship between images and fears, on being addicted to the apocalypse, on the ravaged relationship between man and nature. For the zone to be decontam- inated and returned to the people, nature itself will have to undergo an amputation.

The film begins with a volcanic eruption that stranded the director, Pauline Julier, in a foreign city, among strangers. In turns, these strangers evoke legends about the formation of the continents, the blooming of the tectonic plates or the explosion of ash that provoked summers without sun.

The Future Circular Collider is the machine of the future. Thanks to it, we will finally be able to go back in time to the origin of our universe. But which way do we go to set up the largest scientific instrument of all time? Between metaphysics and underground tunnels, a story of the preparations or how men are ready to move mountains for more knowledge.

Werner Herzog gains exclusive access to film inside the Chauvet caves of Southern France and captures the oldest known pictorial creations of humanity

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.” Einstein. All over the world bees have been dying for the past three years. Although the causes for this are still a mystery, one thing is already clear: there is more at stake than simply a few dead insects, and a great deal more than just honey. Seeking answers, the film embarks on a journey to meet with people whose lives depend on bees: to a Swiss beekeeper living on an Alp; to the gigantic almond plantations in California; to a bee brain researcher in Berlin; to a pollen trader in China; and to the killer bees in the Arizona desert. All report on how the bees are vanishing. The film tells us about their lives. And about ours.

Through her child’s eyes, Patpro will go through three periods of the history of her indigenous people, in the heart of the Brazilian forest. Tirelessly persecuted, but guided by their ancestral rites, their love of nature and their fight to preserve their freedom, the Krahô never stop inventing new forms of resistance.

Young brothers Max and Leo dream of going to Disneyland, but having just emigrated from Mexico to the USA they first have to settle in their new homeland. And they have to stick to the seven rules their mother has set down for them.

Inside the Argentinian highlands, a native llama herder follows the traces of an invisible puma who is killing his livestock. Through his search, a mystical exchange is revealed between him, his ancestors and the changing form of the puma.

Fatimetu is born to a Sahrawi family in a Saharan refugee camp in Algeria and later sent to live with foster parents in Spain. After the death of her mother she returns to the camp. She has been absent for sixteen years. Her brother now expects her to stay and look after her sister Hayat, who has difficulty walking. Fatimetu, who unlike the other women can drive a car, finds work transporting animals, meat and bread from one administrative district to another. In time, the Sahrawi people become accustomed to the woman who tears about the desert without a hijab in her beaten up jeep. But Fatimetu is torn between life in the desert and her memories of her family and friends in Spain. The Sahrawi are a Moorish ethnic group in Algeria that is still waiting for the referendum that will define their status under international law. Told in concentrated, poetic images, Pedro Pérez Rosado’s film does not only give us the story of two reunited sisters or the clash of two different cultures; he also allows his Saharan protagonists to describe in their own words their political and social predicament.

In a traditional tribal society in the South Pacific, a young girl, Wawa, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an intertribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal. The young lovers run away, refusing her arranged fate. They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.

It might take two viewings to grasp fully what Fernando Pérez is doing in "Suite Habana," an elusive but intermittently beautiful tone poem on film. There is virtually no dialogue. There are no story lines that build to a climax, no documentary-style voice-overs. There are just snippets from a day in Havana, so disjointed and seemingly random that it takes a while to realize that Mr. Pérez is focusing on 10 specific individuals, tracking them through 24 hours in their painfully ordinary lives.

"NOT ME - A Journey with Not Vital" takes us on an intriguing foray into the eventful life and creative artistic expressions of contemporary Swiss artist Not Vital. This film essay sheds light on the work of the internationally renowned Grisons artist who for a long time remained the "well-known unknown" inside his home country. Director Pascal Hofmann traces the driving force of this restless cosmopolitan, and establishes a dialogue between the motifs in Vital's work, his childhood dreams, and the influences of his most important places of stay such as Beijing, Patagonia, Niger, "his" village of Sent in the Grisons, and New York. The film opens up visually stunning insights into Vital's perception of reality and its artistic transformation. From beginning to end, this film tells the author's enraptured exploration of the longings of an artist who came from the mountains.

Before entering a prestigious American university, Gabriel Buchmann decided to travel the world for one year, his backpack full of dreams. After ten months on the road, he arrived in Kenya determined to discover the African continent. Until he reached the top of Mount Mulanje, Malawi, his last destination.

Félicité is a proud and independent woman who works as a singer in a bar in Kinshasa. Whenever she goes on stage, she appears to leave the world and her everyday worries behind. Her audiences are quickly infected by the rhythm of her music and her powerful, melancholy melodies. But then one day Félicité’s son has a terrible accident. Whilst he is in hospital she desperately tries to raise the money needed for his operation. A breathless tour through the impoverished streets and the wealthier districts of the Congolese capital ensues. One of the bar’s regulars is a man named Tabu who has been known to get carried away in every sense of the term. Tabu offers to help Félicité. Reluctantly, she accepts. After his spell in hospital, Félicité’s son has a hard time picking up his old life, but it is lady’s man Tabu of all people who manages to coax him out of his shell. Félicité’s sparsely furnished flat with its permanently defunct fridge becomes a mini utopia in a country that holds no hope for most of its population. The trio forms an eccentric community thrown together by fate, each of whom is free to go their separate ways together.

Croatia, January 1992. In the midst of the Yugoslav Wars, Chris, a young Swiss journalist is found dead in mysterious circumstances. He was wearing the uniform of an international mercenary group. Anja Kofmel was his cousin. As a little girl, she used to admire this handsome young man; now a grown-up woman, she decides to investigate his story, trying to understand what really was the involvement of Chris in the conflict

Rosa, a Mozambican peasant, is accused by the family of her husband of having caused his suicide by refusing to obey him. She is suspected of having a "spirit-husband". In order to prove her innocence, Rosa submits herself to two trials: one by a traditional healer, the other in court. She is absolved twice. Nevertheless, the dead man relatives continue to persecute her and she is punished in a cruel way. The film is interpreted by the real players of this story, the dead man by his twin brother. During the shooting, the director decided to install a second camera to follow the never ending plot of revenge. Such a complex editing has no parallel in African cinema.