Every year, SWISS FILMS Previews showcases six new and engaging Swiss documentary films nearing completion that are ready to be launched onto the festival circuit. This year’s presentation runs April 17 and is designed to offers sales agents, international distributors and film festival representatives the opportunity to discover these new docs.
“I think we have a great diversity of storytelling and of background and among the six projects we have three women directors (or co-directors) and four women producers. That’s important for us,” Ducos underlines to Business Doc Europe.
Yes, Visions du Réel may be a Swiss fest, but it’s still a particularly busy period for promotional body Swiss Films that represents three films in International Feature Film Competition. There are two more in Burning Lights Competition and ten more in the National Competition.
What’s more, three Swiss projects – Totemic (Intermezzo Films in co-production Dirk Manthey Film), To the Moon and Back (Rita Productions) and The Last Days of the Hospital (Box Productions in co-production with TS Productions) – are presented as part of VdR-Industry’s core Pitching showcase.
Additionally, Switzerland is the Country of Honour at Marché du Film (Cannes 2024). Swiss Films will, together with Visions du Réel, present four Docs-in-Progress during the upcoming Cannes Docs.
SWISS FILMS PREVIEWS 2024
Nicola Bellucci’s 106-minute QUIR (100% finance in place) tells of a store in Palermo quite unlike any other. It is called Quir and is “a place of love defying any convention – an important meeting place of the LGBTQI+ scene, where people chat about their love stories or seek advice – fighting for acceptance in Sicily, a stronghold of patriarchal culture.”
“The film is documenting the story of this couple who own this place where people from the LGBTQI+ plus community are gathering and chattingh every day,” says Swiss Film’s Charlotte Ducos. “It’s very light, so lively and very open. They have great openness for discussions. What I find really interesting is that we see all very different generations – young, not so young, and more older people – talking together. It’s very touching and very interesting to observe. And of course it’s in a country that is very regressive towards [LGBTQI+] rights.”
The film, whose expected date of release is Fall 2024, is produced by Frank Matter of soap factory GmbH.
Director Bellucci Nicola is known for his award-winning documentary In the Garden of Sounds (2010), which screened at numerous festivals worldwide and for Grozny Blues (2015), which was selected for Visions du Réel, DOK Leipzig, IDFA among others. The Stone Eater (2018) was Bellucci’s first fiction film.
ICEMAN by Corina Gamma is described as a “story about the life and determination of a polar explorer, whose ambition and research to draw attention to the effects of climate change tragically cost him his own life.”
In August 2020, news from Greenland shook the public and the scientific community around the world. Swiss polar researcher Konrad Steffen, or “Koni“ called by his friends, did not return to the base camp ‘Swiss Camp’ from a routine walk to a measuring station on Greenland’s Ice Cap. It is assumed that bad weather conditions and a thin layer of fresh snow caused him to fall into a crevasse. To this day, there have been no traces of him.
“He was a passionate researcher and director Corina Gamma was a friend of his,” says Ducos. “She had this very personal bond and insight into his motivation, and the film has both layers, a personal portray of him but also his thoughts about climate change and what he was experiencing in Greenland. It was something he tried to convey to the main public, and I think this documentary is going to very interesting as a mix.”
The English/Swiss German-language doc, produced by Tellfilm GmbHfilm, will be available in 90-minute and 50-minute formats. 94% of the budget is in place. Producers are Danielle Giuliani, Patrick Merkle. The expected date of release is Summer 2024.
Director Gamma’s SILA and the Gatekeepers of the Arctic (2016) also bore witness to the effects of climate change on Greenland’s indigenous peoples.
Zijad Ibrahimovic’s second feature doc THE BOY FROM THE RIVER DRINA concerns Irvin who, as a child was forced to flee Bosnia but who now has returned to his homeland to seek ‘redemption,’ namely by building a small village with his own hands. ““The only tragedy is to lose hope“, he says. “I returned to write the future, to put one foot in front of the other.”
Born in 1978 in Loznica (former Yugoslavia), director Ibrahimovic fled his country with his family in 1992 when war broke out, just like the protagonist of his film.
“We see a very personal approach in the film because the protagonist Irvin is a very sensitive man and it’s difficult for him to talk about this period of his life. But he has this very universal feeling that he wants to [deliver] peace to his people after the trauma of war,” says Ducos.
Produced by Nicola Bernasconi of Rough Cat sagl, the 70/52-minute film will be available late Summer/Autumn. Ninety-five per cent of the €203,000 budget is in place.
The thought-provoking SPHERES by Daniel Zimmermann promises a “metaphorical dissolution of the ego in 10 mind-expanding tableaux.” The film commences with a man throwing a wooden slat up into the sky. It vanishes on the horizon and circles the earth only to return and strike him on the back of the head. “He films with 360 degrees sequences, and we follow him on this of journey of introspection,” says Ducos, who further underlines its “new storytelling” qualities of this “essay with images.”
Zimmermann’s feature-length Walden (2018) won several awards (KVIFF, Zurich) and screened at Sundance, Rotterdam, and Lincoln Center in New York.
The 90-minure Spheres, produced by Aline Schmid, Adrian Blaser of Beauvoir Films and Ralph Wieser (Mischief Films) will be ready for Summer 2024.
Svetlana Rodina and Laurent Stoop’s highly topical DOM follows “a lost generation of young Russians who arrive in Tbilisi, Georgia. Forced to leave their homeland by Putin’s war and repression, they live as digital dissidents searching for a new home.”
In 2017, co-director Rodina emigrated to Switzerland. Her first cinema documentary, directed together with Laurent Stoop, was the highly regarded Ostrov – Lost Island (2021), which screened at Visions du Réel and was awarded Best International Feature at Hot Docs.
“Once again, this is a very personal film, and also very political. It is about the question, how do you live? How do you feel when you have to flee your home country and cannot go back anytime soon?” says Ducos. “These are very, very young protagonists and have this big hope that they can do something with their lives, even if they are not in their homeland anymore.”
Produced by Corinna Dästner of DokLab, the expected date of release the 100-minute Dom is Summer/Autumn 2024. 95% of the €740,000 budget is in place.
Sales representation is available on all the above films.
The sixth project, KALARI – THE MARTIAL ART OF FEMALE POWER, is produced by sales doyenne and producer Esther van Messel of First Hand Films, together with Maria Kaur Bedi of Spirited Heroine Productions. The logline reads how, “in male-dominated Indian society, young women’s passion for Kalari, one of the oldest martial arts in the world, becomes the starting point for a journey of self-discovery and self-assertion.”
Award-winning Swiss filmmaker Maria Kaur Bedi directs alongside Indian filmmaker Satindar Singh Bedi, together using the moniker Bedi Duo. Their autobiographical The Curse (2022) won the Zurich Film Prize 2023 for the best artistic concept.
“It’s a second feature as well,” says Swiss Films’ Ducos. “It’s a fascinating topic about young women in India. They learn this martial art and define their place in society because they are more confident and can defend themselves. And we have different characters. We have a teacher, we have a 9-year-old girl, an academic master, a female master of this martial art. So it’s following their path in this ‘art’ as well as showing how they cope in their daily lives. It is also very striking cinematographically.”
The expected release date of the 90/52-minute film Kalari is March 2025.
