Strong Showing for Swiss Cinema at Berlin Film Festival

Switzerland, because of its prolific co-production exercise, has a hand in a record-breaking 11 titles within the Berlinale’s official choice, together with two movies competing for the Golden Bear, and two extra in Berlin’s cutting-edge Encounters part, in addition to a Swiss expertise chosen for the fest’s Taking pictures Stars occasion, Souheila Yacoub.

Ursula Meier’s “The Line” (competitors) — Following “Residence” and “Sister,” Meier continues to pursue “this concept of household that’s as a lot obligatory, as it’s poisonous,” says the movie’s producer Pauline Gygax. After a violent argument together with her mom, Margaret, 35 (Stephanie Blanchoud), who has a protracted historical past of inflicting and affected by violence, is subjected to a restraining order. She isn’t allowed to make contact together with her mom (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) or come inside 100 meters of the household dwelling. However the separation exacerbates her want to be nearer to her household, so she returns daily to this invisible however impassable frontier. The movie additionally stars Benjamin Biolay.

Michael Koch’s “A Piece of Sky” (competitors) — In his second characteristic, following “Marija,” the director delves deep into the Swiss Alps to depict a story that’s haunted him since listening to it on the radio. A narrative of affection and violent passions involving a pair, Anna and Marco, who’s recognized with a malignant mind tumor shortly after their wedding ceremony and grows more and more violent. Marco is even accused of sexually abusing Anna’s daughter, however she decides to honor his final want and stick with him till his demise. Koch selected to forged non-professional actors in a distant mountain village populated by ancestral characters, “spending three years there, laying the inspiration that may permit him to achieve their belief,” says producer Christof Neracher, who notes that this pic marks “the primary Swiss-German film in a decade that’s made it into the Berlin competitors.”

Cyril Schaublin’s “Unrest” (Encounters) — The director, who’s a descendant of watchmaking manufacturing unit employees, has set the followup to his trendy 2017 debut “These Who Are Wonderful” in a nineteenth century watchmaking city in Switzerland being remodeled by new applied sciences. There, Josephine, a younger manufacturing unit employee, produces the stability wheel on the coronary heart of mechanical watches. Uncovered to the period’s new methods of organizing cash, time and labor, she will get concerned with the native motion of anarchist watchmakers and turns into romantically entangled with Russian traveler Pyotr Kropotkin.

Mitra Farahani’s “See You Friday, Robinson” (Encounters) — This long-gestating non-conventional doc directed by Iranian multi-hyphenate Farahani facilities round a dialog between Jean-Luc Godard and Iranian filmmaker and literary determine Ebrahim Golestan that came about through common weekly e mail exchanges involving movies, photographs, aphorisms and letters.

Souheila Yacoub, Taking pictures Star — Yacoub, who broke out as a member of the demonic dance troupe in Gaspar Noe’s “Climax,” which premiered in Cannes in 2019, and in Philippe Garrel’s 2020 drama “The Salt of Tears,” has the excellence of getting been at Cannes final yr with two movies through which she performs the lead: “A Brighter Tomorrow” by Yassine Qnia, and feminine friendship drama “The Braves” by Anaïs Volpe.