A week in the life of a cosmetics salesman who visits beauty salons to beat his way through the after-work hours. His journey across a wintery Switzerland of grey suburbs and villages takes him via hairdressers shops, hotel rooms and sleezy bars to construction sites and fairs, over snow-covered mountains and through spooky shopping zones back to his home parking lot. He meets people of every stripe, chats, argues and remains silent with them and never gets rid of his silent companion, the melancholy of isolation.
Tag: SWITZERLAND
Il Ladro di Bambini begins in Milan, where Sicilian siblings Rosetta, 11, and Luciano, 9, live with their destitute mother. The woman regularly prostitutes Rosetta and is arrested; her children are immediately made wards of the court. Carabiniere Antonio Criaco is assigned to escort them to a foster home in a mission that appears to be simple. Yet, years of abuse forbid the siblings to trust, obey, or even like Antonio. Rosetta is hostile and demanding; Luciano is sullen and remote. When the Catholic foster home will not accept the children on the grounds of Rosetta’s past, Antonio independently decides to bring them south to a home in Sicily.
The daily life in the primary school of Taillères, in the La Brévine valley, is filmed over the course of an entire school year, from 1959 to 1960. Henry Brandt’s film, which won the Vela d’argento in Locarno in 1961, is a unique testimony to pedagogical processes, with a tender observation of the relationship between the young protagonists, their place of birth and the adult world.
A middle-aged TV reporter goes to the inn of a small Swiss village to do a programme with a reclusive scientist, an expert on world food shortages. During this time, a local worker is killed in a road crash and the reporter becomes involved in uncovering the truth about his death.
Yaaba unfolds in the spectacular landscapes of rural Burkina Faso in a mythical time when peasant life was still unspoiled by colonialism. It is the story of a friendship between Bila, Nopoko and an old woman shunned as a witch by the rest of the community. Unafraid of her, twelve-year old Bila calls her “Yaaba” (grandmother) and learns the value of intolerance and his own worth as a human being. Ouédraogo, who shot the film in his own village, said that it was “based on tales of my childhood and on that kind of bedtime storytelling we hear just before falling asleep.”
An old barber finds himself at a loss when called upon to shave an unusually jittery customer. When all attempts at idle everyday chatter fail to calm the man, the barber desperately falls back on his last resort: to tell the only secret he knows.
The titular Marie-Louise is a young French lass who is evacuated to Switzerland when her country is overrun by the Nazis. Suffering a nervous breakdown, she is given comfort and shelter by a wealthy family. Unfortunately, living in the lap of luxury makes Marie-Louise hesitant to return home to her mother and war torn home. Eventually the girl comes to her senses, but it isn’t easy.
Alexandre, a TV reporter, is working for a few days in a border town, where a lot of refugees from Albania, Turkey and Kurdistan are packed in. Among them, he notices an old man and thinks he is an important Greek politician who disappeared mysteriously a few years ago. Back in Athens, he asks this politician’s former wife to come and identify him. A slow and dry meditation about the inhumanity of borders.