Life in Progress

Ceci est mon royaume

Citizen Fred

Jan

Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch - Das grosse Spiel Film

Jung und Jenisch

Juntos, un retour en Argentine

L'autre versant de Gstaad

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tout dire

Ina, Amer & Elvis

Eine ruhige Jacke

Epoca

Face au juge

Feuer & Flamme

Greina

Hans Josephsohn - Im Haus der Plastik

Hotel Abyssinie

I Am Mariam Binladen

Vaters Garten - Die Liebe meiner Eltern

The father tends his large garden with the utmost precision. The mother irons shirts and regrets that the father never wears T-shirts. The father likes order, always knows best, and has everything under control. The mother prays and talks of her loneliness. The two are fundamentally different, have opposing views and interests, and have been married for 62 years. Closely knit yet poles apart: this is the ambivalent standpoint from which Peter Liechti turns his lens on his elderly parents and the story of their marriage. Alongside conversations that shift from slapstick to insanity and observations of daily life in his parents’ cramped, lower middle class apartment, a puppet theatre is also established as a second location. This forms the stage for scenes between mother and father to be reenacted by rabbit puppets; as a puppet, the son can also react in explosive fashion.

Geschichte der Nacht

It’s a black-and-white record of European cities in the dark (2-5am), from Basle to Belfast. Quiet, and meditative, what emerges most strongly is an eerie sense of city landscapes as deserted film sets, in which the desolate architecture overwhelms any sense of reality. The only reassurance that we are not in some endless machine-Metropolis is the shadow of daytime activity: a juggernaut plunging through a darkened village, a plague of small birds in the predawn light. The whole thing is underscored by a beautiful ‘composed’ soundtrack, from quietly humming streetlights to reggae and the rumble of armoured cars in Belfast. A strange and remarkable combination of dream, documentary and science-fiction.