Zürcher Tagebuch

Following disastrous floods, a vast construction project is in the process of revitalizing the Rhone by removing the concrete straitjacket, and instead enlarging the river's bed to promote river life. The filmmaker follows the development of this unusually inclusive project through its diverse protagonists, including hydrobiologists, fishermen, farmers, engineers and concerned citizens. Their divergent concerns permit a fuller and unbiased understanding of the complexity of such a project. As a result, this engaging and lyrical film is a journey that prompts a universal questioning of our past and future relationship with nature and territory.

Between 1931 to 2002, Switzerland issued some six million seasonal residence permits, known as "A" permits, to immigrant workers. This status carried drastic rules, such as a ban on family reunification and a stay in Switzerland limited to nine months a year. In open letters, former seasonal workers and their children recount the impact this system had on their lives.

In 1967, in the middle of the Cold War, Joseph Stalin's only daughter goes to the American embassy in New Delhi and asks for asylum. Svetlana leaves behind her country and her two children. Hunted by the press, the KGB, and many admirers, the woman, nicknamed the Kremlin princess, will never cease to flee. From the summit of the Soviet empire to the solitude and poverty of her last years in a Wisconsin home, Gabriel Tejedor traces the destiny of a resolutely free woman, at the very heart of the century and its geopolitical challenges.

Environmental activists Thor, Hulk, Black Panther, Captain Anarchy and Batman illegally occupy Mormont Hill. They create a utopian model of society while waging a peaceful struggle against the enemy: the cement industry. Far from any society, these activists invent, create and reclaim a threatened site. A new threat looms when the police announce that they will soon be evicted. Zadvengers offers a poetic and personal vision of the reality of activism in the "Zones to be Defended" (ZADs).

Welcome to “the prime of life”. All his life, Rudy has worked hard for the firm, and for the family. But now, everything is about to change: Rudy retires. No alarm clock, no meetings, no travels to distant countries to set the pace. Shopping, cooking, gardening, and the daily routines of marital bliss will now fill his schedule. Rudy was actually looking forward to it, to the next phase. But as he soon realizes, “the prime of life” is a wild ride on an emotional rollercoaster. Retirement is not for cowards.

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. A group of friends get together to make a film about their experiences growing up in suburban Switzerland.

Bern, 1980: A caleidoscopic portrait of Swiss urban life in the early 1980s.

The protests of 1968 had a significant impact on the great cities of the world. But people like to forget that the periphery went through the same social upheavals – Central Switzerland, for example. This is hardly surprising: in the founding cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy, society followed a strict order; tradition, shaped by centuries of Catholic rule, seemed untouchable. But in the 1960s, the local youth could not take these stifling conditions anymore: starting in 1969, resistance broke out across Central Switzerland.

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. Together with a few friends (among them famous Swiss actor Stefan Kurt), director Aron Nick's father and uncle shoot the idealistic Super 8 film "Dr Tscharniblues" ("The Tscharni Blues") – a wild, unvarnished self-portrait of their generation. 40 years later, Nick gathers the friends at Tscharnergut and asks what has happened to them and their ideals in the meantime. What have the achieved? What have they lost? Past, present, and future clash and form a journey of personal disappointments, hopes, and a collective search for identity. In "Tscharniblues II," Aron Nick discovers a kind of friendship that can weather anything.

Essay on the epic story of an ordinary man, a filmmaker, born in the beginning of the Second World War. From 1942 to 2016, his personal story and the world history, the history of his films, of cinema and the images that inspired him. Life and creation entangled, untangled, intertwined, jostled together. From his childhood to his first steps as an artist. From the distant war to the war against everyone, from the dreamed revolution to the consumer society that ruins your dreams like Coca Cola dissolves your bones.

In 1966, John Harlin II died while attempting Europe's most difficult climb, the North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland. 40 years later, his son John Harlin III, an expert mountaineer and the editor of the American Alpine Journal, returns to attempt the same climb.