Andres Pfäffli

The Age of Innocence

A personal diary that also acts as a sentimental journey. Will the man-child that emerges from behind the camera be able to glimpse something of himself before growing to maturity? One of Enrico Maisto’s most intimate and enlightening films.

Saitenstich

In 1902 Switzerland, child laborer Emma is expected to thread needles, but just like children today, she desperately tries to live her dream of playing the violin.

Nha Mila

After fourteen years away from her homeland, Salomé is forced to return to Cape Verde to see her dying brother. During her stopover at Lisbon airport, Águeda, a cleaning lady, recognizes Salomé as "Mila", her childhood friend. Águeda invites Salomé to leave the airport and spend the stopover at her home, with the women of her family. The neighborhood transports her on a spiritual journey, whose destination reveals a painful bond with her homeland.

Paul Nizon: Der Nagel im Kopf

The film tells of the radical life-search by the Swiss writer Paul Nizon, born 1929 in Bern, Switzerland, who became what “he was meant to be” in Paris. Now 90-year-old, Paul Nizon grants insights into his life and work in a self-ironic, direct manner. The intimate portrait of a great literary outsider emerges, for whom the risk of life and the risk of writing merge into one and the same work of art.

Libellula gentile. Fabio Pusterla, il lavoro del poeta

A film about the Swiss Italian poet Fabio Pusterla and his creative poetic process, his struggle to find an honest language, one which adheres to the personal experience and is able to unfold a hidden truth that creates a strong and profound bond with the other, with his public.

Il colore nascosto delle cose

Teo has a good job, a fiancee, a lover, no intention to assume any responsibility in his life. Meeting Emma, a blind woman, will upset his convictions.

7 Minutes

Women in a failing silk factory, fight to find a way to keep their jobs.

Il fiume ha sempre ragione

Alberto Casiraghy and Josef Weiss are true bibliophile artists. One in Osnago, the other in Mendrisio, they have been dedicating themselves for years to valuable editorial and typographical activities, still printing with mobile characters, preserving the memory of a perfect ingenuity made of manual skills and technique, but also of inventiveness and poetry. Silvio Soldini gives us a realistic and poetical portrait of these two artists-artisans, who chose one of the oldest professions in a modern world, finding great success and approval.

Per altri occhi

Impaired vision-friendly documentary about blindness.

Trees

Wrapping the audience in waves of sound, Alberi takes us on a circular journey through the Italian countryside. The marvelous natural music at the tops of the eponymous trees makes way for the rhythmic cadence of civilization—men baring axes and the natural clatter of daily life—before their unforgettable return home from the forest. The singular artistry of director Michelangelo Frammartino (Le quatro volte) is beautifully displayed in this mesmerizing homage to nature.

Garibaldi's Lovers

A widowed working-class father falls in love with a struggling, poor artist.

All About You

Pauline, a beguiling woman in her 60s, returns to her hometown, Turin, for the first time since she was ten years old. She has inherited her aunt’s apartment in town. In Turin Pauline contacts Dr. Angela Gualtieri, a psychologist whom she had met abroad some time before; Angela runs a maternity centre, the Melograno, a support centre where both mothers to be and young mothers with post natal depression seek help. At the Melograno they are constantly short of help, that’s why Angela asks Pauline to give her a hand in setting up an in-house archive collecting different material relating to maternity: video interviews to new mothers, mothers diaries, photo portraits of mother and child. Pauline accepts and starts her work plunging deep in an emotional material that touches her strongly: the controversial feelings experienced by women in their relation with the child.

The Substance: Albert Hofmann's LSD

By coincidence rather than by design, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann makes a sensational discovery in the spring of 1943. He realizes that he is dealing with a powerful molecule that will have an impact that reaches far beyond the scientific world. THE SUBSTANCE is an investigation into our troubled relationship with LSD, told from its beginnings to today.

The Four Times

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

Fallen Heroes

Forty year-old Bruno Ledeux, seen sitting across from the doctor, gives the impression of a man who is no longer young but not yet old.Condemned to remain nothing more than a son, he begins his downward slide, as if a fog had shut him in a cage from which there is no escape. Bruno can never have children .He says nothing about this diagnosis to Anne, his beloved wife. Nor does he tell her about a large debt he has taken out. It is as if Bruno were a man without any qualities or talents. A mediocre man who has lost all pride. Though now everything appears hazy in his memory. Like a river that flows peacefully, showing no signs of the hidden currents at work below. But at times those currents can return to the surface. Without warning.

Dutti der Riese

Documentary about Swiss grocery store pioneer Gottlieb Duttweiler

Colossal Youth

After the Portuguese government demolishes his slum and relocates him to a housing project on the outskirts of Lisbon, 75-year-old Cape Verde immigrant Ventura wanders between his new and old homes, reconnecting with people from his past.

Tycoon's Interpreter

Ira is Russian. Ivan Tashkov, too. She is 23 years old, lives in Geneva with her mother and knows very little about her homeland. Tashkov is a supposed gangster of the Russian mafia, and is in jail waiting to be judged. Ira, who is searching for her roots and her own path in life, happens to be the interpreter of Tashkov's defense lawyer, and gets instantly captivated by of this powerful, cultured and manipulative man.

Into Great Silence

An intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in the French Alps (Chartreuse Mountains). The idea for the film was proposed to the monks in 1984, but the Carthusians said they wanted time to think about it. The Carthusians finally contacted Gröning 16 years later to say they were now willing to permit Gröning to shoot the movie, if he was still interested.

Happiness Costs Nothing

A man in his forties has had enough. He leaves his loveless family, uninspiring job and fake friends and tries to find something more. He meets a young woman he falls for, but she puts him on the test.

Angel on the Right

An unrepentant prodigal son straight out of a Russian jail returns to his hometown, Asht, to help his mother die with dignity. But his debts in his hometown are many and long overdue, the townspeople are tough as nails, and he soon gets more than he expected from the quiet village. In this dark comedy, his third feature, writer-director Jamshed Usmonov cast the population of Asht as its own persuasive self and his own mother and brother as the fractured yet formidable domestic couple.

In Vanda's Room

An unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but taking as main focus the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.

Megaville

In the future, national boundaries have been broken down and two giant super-states remain—the bleak, oppressive, and totalitarian "Hemisphere," and the sprawling and futuristic "Megaville." Megaville has an elected president, but the entire system is rife with corruption. All forms of media are encouraged in Megaville, but this freedom has aided moral decay with the distribution of pornography and violent movies. Outside Megaville lies the Hemisphere; whereas Megaville is clean and ordered, the Hemisphere is in a state of decay. Travel from the Hemisphere to Megaville is restricted with few exceptions to the powerful. An outwardly totalitarian regime governs the daily life of civilians in the Hemisphere and the people live in fear of the "CKS" (the secret police). All forms of media are illegal in the Hemisphere. CC wikipedia.org