A little girl and the snowman have exciting adventures in the forest.

Three children, Spring, Summer and Autumn, won't let their little brother Winter play along with them. So he has to find a way to make his sisters and brothers notice him. And he does.

The little bird and the leaf live together in the big forest. One day, in early winter, it is time for the leaf to fly away. The bird follows his friend until they have to part. Left alone, the little bird has to face the dangers of the forest all by himself.

This film does away with the stereotype that yodelling belongs in the somewhat dowdy corner of folksy music shows in dirndls and lederhosen. For two years, the filmmaker followed the Wiesenberger Yodellers on their way to show business. They are a club of 20 yodelling Swiss mountain farmers who used to meet in the chapel once a week to yodel together – until they won the “The Greatest Swiss Hits” talent show. Now the amateur yodellers are recording artists swamped with offers. Some of the farmers have reached their limit; others are intoxicated by the new world opening up to them. Then they get the offer to represent Switzerland at the Shanghai Expo – during haymaking season of all times. This is where their success becomes the acid test for the yodelling club, where traditionally all decisions are democratically discussed and reached by consensus.
This film shows how different ideas of solidarity and friendship work, documenting how the yodellers manage to stay authentic despite the limelight. And it casually dusts off the image of musicians who make folk music in the best sense of the word. You’ll leave the cinema yodelling!
– Antje Stamer

The film follows five forest dwellers on their search for food for the winter and shows how they survive the cold season. The surprises are in store for them in spring.

Little Julia is alone at home when suddenly the shadow in the living room seems to come alive! To save her teddybear Julia must face the fright and find a way to overcome her own fear.

The slow travelling shot along a stone wall through whose openings we get only occasional glimpses of the azure sea suggests an antique excavation. But appearances are deceptive, for this is 1948. The world is still under the shock of the World War when old frontlines re-emerge in Greece and a violent civil war begins. The Communist Party and the National Liberation Front, who just fought the Fascists in a gruelling partisan war, are banned and 80,000 Greeks are deported to barren islands like Makronisos. The crackling loudspeakers broadcast perfidious prohibitions and the mantra of the ten commandments which demand that people renounce communism and join the patriotic fight for “God, country and freedom”. Their goal: re-education. In reality this is psychological terror, combined with harassment and torture. But the walls of Makronisos aren’t silent. Their cracks used to hide poems by many poets like Yannis Ritsos, Tassos Livaditis and Mikis Theodorakis, who were interned here. Their yearning metaphors and powerful poetry are an attempt to stand up to the crude propaganda permanently broadcast throughout the tent camp. The Swiss director Oliver Zuchuat lets the texts clash and speak for themselves in a strict and consistent composition.

Cornelia Klauß

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Preis der Ökumenischen Jury 2012

Erich Langjahr may be widely regarded as the personification of mountain films. He has been part of Leipzig since the 1970s, caused a sensation with his Alpine trilogy, enchanted everyone with his “Erbe der Bergler” – and has now announced that he is going to present his last (or so he says) mountain film. It’s dedicated to the Rigi: a summit once described as the centre of the world, which is still partly true for many people in Switzerland. How do you describe a mountain? Erich Langjahr’s method: stay away from all folklore, be poetic and therefore concrete. Once more he unites precision and soul as he observes a native of the Rigi region felling trees, cutting posts, pouring concrete or shovelling snow, sharing a meal with friends, driving cattle up and down the mountain and walking over the mountain. This appropriation is never contemplative – and here’s another constant in Langjahr’s philosophy -, but always active. Langjahr’s camera, which was once fascinated by haymaking on the mountain, is now immersing itself in the ballet of a mini-excavator or the virtuosity of a chainsaw. The Rigi is no refuge of the pre-modern age: there’s mass tourism here as well as futuristic viewing platforms, high rises and the inevitable “Rigi Events”.
And yet this film – maybe helped by the transcendent and jazzy alpenhorn soundtrack – is a hymn to what is sacred to us (even in a secularised world) – and to Switzerland, this strange and distant planet.
– Grit Lemke

She and he. Separated by a ceiling, unaware of each other's existence, unknowingly repeat the same gestures. Black and white, light and darkness, a man and a woman. Opposites that complement and penetrate each other. A compelling story about emotional entanglement.

A road in an arid desert. A car pulls off on the parking of a motel. A man holding a cardboard box comes out of it and rushes into the room number 69 ... in order to amaze the spectator how concise a story can be told.

What is time? Three words forming a question that we will never be able to answer conclusively. Peter Mettler goes on a journey through space and time which lasts 114 minutes.
A NASA pilot rises 10,000 metres above the Alps with a helium balloon to drop back to earth. Where does time end? Scientists at the Swiss CERN try to study the Big Bang. Can time exist without space? When matter destroys all life, earth will revert to its original state. Are there places outside time? A big city where human civilisation is history. Is time a never-ending cycle? In the face of death, life at last – in the here and now. That is the only life, inexorably.
Peter Mettler frees the documentary from its narrative corset and takes us along on a cinematographic free fall experiment. He tackles time, expands and accelerates it, immerses us in breathtaking tableaux, edits voices, images and thought fragments to a space-time-vortex whose suggestive power you can only reject or succumb to. That’s presumptuous, tainted with the risk of failure. That’s great cinema.
– Claas Danielsen

The house is idyllically situated above the city’s rooftops. It offers a safe haven and a warm meal to everyone who is lonely and alone.

Girls in white dancing around a cross, before they tearfully receive “purity rings” and “chastity chests” from their fathers; who lecture about “waiting in purity” and how to modestly cover one’s neckline while serving tea at “purity meetings”. Boys in armour and sword who are knighted as future leaders of the country and the family. White roses and bibles everywhere. It may look like a carnival and mummery, but for 25 percent of the US population this is serious, even sacred.
Mirjam von Arx observed a family of seven in Colorado Springs, the centre of evangelical Christians in the United States, over a period of one and a half years. The Wilsons are the movement’s poster-family, its most zealous defenders, who founded the tradition of the “purity balls” that is now spreading across the globe. A model American family, smart, neat and far from unlikeable. It is one of the achievements of this film that its protagonists are not exhibited as freaks but that the phenomenon is explored in all its complexity, with all political and ideological implications. Because the virgin’s counterpart is the soldier, the GI. He’s fighting in Afghanistan – in agreement with his chaste wife at home – for the “true” values of God and country: against pre-marital sex, people of different colours and faiths, gays, democrats, etc. The private has rarely been so political.
– Grit Lemke