Silvana Bezzola Rigolini

Mola: A Tibetan Tale of Love and Loss

This is the story of Kunsang Wangmo, a 100-year-old Buddhist nun exiled from Tibet in 1959 to escape the Chinese occupation.

The Boy from the River Drina

Forced to flee Bosnia when he was a child, Irvin returns to his homeland. In the same woods where thirty years earlier people took refuge, he decides to build a small village with his own hands. To restore dignity to this place and to the people who died in the war, to heal his wounds, and to fulfill his desire for redemption. But when he is on the River Drina, Irvin does not stop trying to discover what happened, and what could still happen.

Osteria all'undici

After a burn-out, Filippo, a film director, undertakes a professional reintegration as a waiter in a social enterprise.

Flavio Paolucci. From Guelmim to Biasca

In 2022, an exhibition on the Swiss painter-sculptor Flavio Paolucci was planned in a German museum. The museum had reserved a white wall on which the artist was to create a work. Everything was ready, but the pandemic prevented the 88-year-old artist from travelling. So Flavio Paolucci had the idea of creating this mural in his studio and then destroying it.

Radical Landscapes

When filmmaker Elettra Fiumi inherited her father Fabrizio Fiumi’s archives, she discovered a man she knew nothing about. Fabrizio, along with the group of radical architects called 9999, imagined architectural innovations and anticipated a future that is still forthcoming. He was also founder of the Florence Film Festival. In coming to know her father, Fiumi unveils a visionary genius we don’t know enough about.

Hugo in Argentina

A promising Italian cartoonist lands in Buenos Aires in 1950, with the dream of reaching the United States, to discover that, for him, America will be Argentina. The country immediately overwhelms him with its massive economic boom and a cultural scene among the most vibrant in the world. We are at the dawn of Argentina's most delirious decade, and the young immigrant feels that the vast promise of this country is within his grasp. His name will indeed make itself known: Hugo Pratt.

Only a Child

Only a Child is an omnibus animation short that gives shape and colour to Severn Suzuki's original speech at the UN Summit in Rio (1992): a child's desperate call to action for our planet's future.

Sòne:

Daniel Kemény returns twenty years later to the place of his childhood, the village of Pietrapaola in Calabria. In search of lost time, the filmmaker collects musical accounts, brings together their protagonists and gives these memories a new life, thus playing the generous transmitter who helps keep alive the oral history of a world whose popular traditions are dying off.

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.

The Sisters of Rocinante

The outbreak of the economic crisis in Spain led thousands of horses (a symbol of prestige in the years of plenty for nouveau-riches) to be abandoned by their owners. On the southeastern coast of Spain, a 45-year-old British woman, aided by her volunteer helpers, has set up a rescue farm; a modern-day Noah’s Arc that offers refuge and healing to undernourished and tortured horses (and other animals). A humble yet noble tale of perseverance and endurance and a parable for our times, which applies to people as well: once our shine comes off, society deems us redundant.

Isola

We enter the film, like we access Gorgona, by the sea. A rock bristling with greenery, surrounded by the dark blue waves of the Mediterranean. On this small island between Tuscany and Corsica, there is an agricultural penal colony. The prisoners held there are free to move around, working the vines, the small pig farm or the vegetable garden surrounding the prison buildings. Here, the relationship to nature is particular and undoubtedly redeeming.

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.

CHoosing at Twenty

Between 1954-1962, one hundred to three hundred young French people refused to participate in the Algerian war. These rebels, soldiers or conscripts were non-violent or anti-colonialists. Some took refuge in Switzerland where Swiss citizens came to their aid, while in France they were condemned as traitors to the country. In 1962, a few months after Independence, Villi Hermann went to a region devastated by war near the Algerian-Moroccan border, to help rebuild a school. In 2016 he returned to Algeria and reunited with his former students. He also met French refractories, now living in France or Switzerland.

Per altri occhi

Impaired vision-friendly documentary about blindness.

Into the Light

A philosophy student starts filming his life and compares the videos with his memories to explore the limits of human perception. The videos seem very reliable at first, but he soon realizes their flaws as he is constantly aware of being watched and judged by an unseen entity: his future self.