Whereas Edgar Hagen observed psychiatric patients in his last films, he now looks into the abysses of a mentally disturbed society. A society that believes in a technology which has increasingly proved to be uncontrollable and keeps promoting it against its better judgment. Because it supposedly exists, the safest place on earth, where deathly nuclear waste can be stored harmlessly for hundreds of thousands of years.
Playing dumb in the tradition of the medieval fool, Hagen asks to see this place. He travels around the world, from Switzerland to Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, China, Japan, the United States, Australia, and back. He crosses oceans and deserts, hikes through forests and moors, explores the interiors of mountains. The scenery grows more and more unreal, the Grail more and more distant. Hagen meets geologists and nuclear lobbyists, environmental activists, tribal leaders, and local politicians. Some of them convinced of the cause, others doubtful. There is a lot of talk about “proof” and “fundamental feasibility”. But he digs deeper, seemingly naive. This narrative attitude enables him to neatly expose all the justification strategies of the nuclear industry as constructs that have long ago ceased to be concerned with technical feasibility and deal only with selling the impossible. A film about madness.

Grit Lemke

A journey to come to terms with grief: the father died. The feeling of having a gap in one’s soul. At the same time, far up north, beyond Arkhangelsk even, in Shoyna on the White Sea, the lighthouse has just been condemned to remain dark forever. The filmmaker feels magically attracted to this strange place which means something to her she doesn’t understand. But when she arrives on the Western Coast of the Kanin Peninsula, the lighthouse keeper, who held out for a long time, has left. She finds only a few dozen inhabitants who stoically set themselves against the decline of history, and the lighthouse rusting away dolefully. But there was a time when the locals faced a rosy future: for many decades, the Soviet fishing industry boomed here – at times Shoyna’s population was over a thousand. Today the sea is overfished. Tons of fish have been replaced by tons of sand which, borne by the wind, settles on the shipwrecks, houses and streets of the former model kolkhoz. The longer filmmaker Dominique de Rivaz is faced with the remaining population’s spirit of survival, the more moments of overwhelming beauty she wrestles from the presence of Shoyna and its residents.

Ralph Eue

After spending the night together a couple parts ways. Inspired by the activities of the man’s morning rituals, she sinks into a dream accompanied by the rhythms of the morning train and finds herself alone once again.

If my trusted therapist assures me that there are no conclusive symptoms of madness, I’m cautiously happy. But what about that other, inconclusive part? Because words still keep rushing at me from there, followed by images and then sounds, until at last everything in my head piles up in a buzzing nervous jam. Muriel Kunz pits herself with masterful ingeniousness against this nasty trouble: like sending a message in a bottle through a high voltage power line, she talks at breakneck speed about the ordinary madness of everyday life and a young woman’s more or less helpless attempts to cope. The film’s visual style keeps shifting between staccato-like interior monologues and short impressionistic breathers in which the images come to the fore again, though only to allow the stream of consciousness to rush off in a different direction at the next instance.

Ralph Eue

There are sensitive souls even among criminals. One should always have the time for a few warm words of encouragement. Like everywhere else, nothing here will work without praise and benevolent feedback. Not on any terms.

On the one hand, history can produce great panoramas or tiny still lives, depending on your focus. On the other hand, history reaches up to the present day; timelines don’t just break off yesterday. And it goes without saying that the presence of a moment ago will be history tomorrow. In this film, Simon Baumann examines the national and regional history of a Swiss village over the past three decades, explicitly including his own biography and what it contributed – usually unnoticed by the individual – to the grand scheme of things, right up to the moment just lived through.
Suberg is a medium-sized village on the Swiss Plateau. Once a remote farming village, it now has excellent traffic connections that have turned it into an anonymous dormitory community. For 32 years, the filmmaker, who lives in Suberg, has successfully ignored the village and its inhabitants. Unlike his grandfather, who used to be central figure in the village, he knows practically nobody here. He wants to change this. But how do you integrate yourself in a village whose community has almost vanished? In his search for answers the director meets people who shaped Suberg and its development, explores their life plans and finds a last, though already endangered, oasis of community spirit in the male choir.

Ralph Eue