Swiss cinema in Venice returns to the traditional habitat of Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, opening its 2024 activities with the “Spring Edition”. Now in its 13th edition, the event will feature 7 films. Many guests will accompany the public in discovering contemporary Swiss cinema. The films of this edition, created in collaboration with the prestigious Swiss festival “Giornate di Solothurn” and with Cinémathèque Suisse, are fresh from great successes at international festivals, testimony to an increasingly reference cinematography for Europe and the world.
The Festival will open on Tuesday 19 March at 6pm with the preview of AVANT IL N’Y AVAIT RIEN, directed by the director of Palestinian origins Yvann Yagchi, and fresh from the great public success at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Made before the explosion of the war between Hamas and Israel last October, the film is an intimate reflection on the conflict that has been confronting Israel and Palestine for decades, starting from the fraternal friendship between the director and a Swiss peer of Israeli origins who it ends abruptly when the latter embraces Zionism and returns to the occupied territories. Wednesday 20 March, double appointment: we start at 6pm with DIE ANHÖRUNG by Lisa Gerig, while at 9pm the director Hugues Hariche will present RIVIÈRE, a powerful coming-of-age novel whose protagonist is a seventeen-year-old who runs away from home in search of her father. Another prestigious preview will open at 6pm on Thursday 21 March: OMEGÄNG (featured photo), signed by director Aldo Gugolz, present in Venice with the film’s producer Christina Caruso. At 9pm, in collaboration with Cinémathèque Suisse, what the film historian Freddy Buache defines as “the most beautiful and most authentic of all Swiss films”, ROMEO UND JULIA AUF DEM DORFE, a 1941 film, taken from a story by Gottfried Keller published in 1856. The closing day, Friday 22 March, will see another great preview, also coming from the last Solothurn Days: BERGFAHRT, by Dominque Margot, a “choral” film which narrates in a brilliant and very original of the eternal relationship between man and the mountains, between fascination and sinister tourist exploitation. A magical and spectacular film at the same time, about a world destined to change, which ideally accompanies us to the last film on the programme, MANGA D’TERRA, a huge success at the last Locarno Film Festival, by the Swiss-Portuguese director Basil Da Cunha, which will be accompanied to Venice by the leading actress and singer Eliana Rosa.
