Returning from war in 1520s Switzerland, mercenary Hansli Gyr finds his homeland divided by the Reformation. As he embraces the teachings of Zwingli, his beloved Ursula is drawn into the radical Anabaptist movement. Their romance is tested by religious conflict, political unrest, and the bloody upheavals that transform their world.
Tag: SWITZERLAND
The documentary, filmed during ethnographic field research, shows three portraits of ‘ordinary’ personalities — Mala, a young weaver sharing a one-bedroom house with nine siblings; Santa Cruz, once a fishtrader and now a healer and magician; and Muthiah, a videographer of upper class weddings — living in a neighbourhood in Nagercoil, a south Indian town. The aim of the video is to show the persons not as representatives of homogeneous masses, but to acknowledge them as individuals who nurse their own specific worries and strategies in a changing world. The protagonists thus themselves comment about their own lives and actions.
Alfredo seems to lead the life of so many Ticinese families born in the valleys, who now only go back to their native village for the weekend. But Alfredo doesn’t longer experiences the journey as a form of escapism, but as an obsessive rite which is repeated over and over again. Alfredo has lost his own identity.
Steven Dyer, an executive working for a giant multinational drugs company, decides to report his employer for breaches of Common Market trading regulations. One night in Basle, Switzerland, he leaves his home to post a letter, the start of a nightmare journey that leads to terrible consequences for his life, his career and for his wife and children.
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.
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.