Lionel Baier

This coming-of-age drama deals with a young man, realizing who he really is and which things he will never do...

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Ricardo and Painting is Barbet Schroeder's portrait of his friend the painter Ricardo Cavallo, who devoted his life to painting. From Buenos Aires to Finistère, via Paris and Peru, this film is an invitation to dive into the history of painting, but also to discover the life of this exceptional man who, with simplicity and humility, always fully committed, to the point of transmitting his passion to the children of his village.

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A group of high school students meet to participate in the national parade with their school. A student, is bullied by the teacher because of her nationality. They react, defend her and the conflict becomes intense. To avoid the consequences, they decide to run away. They settle on the top of a nearby hill and spend the rest of the day there, as an act of escapism. Up there, they seem to have forgotten their anxieties and problems, as if they were in another world.

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Nathalie Adler is on a mission for the EU in Sicily. She organizes the next visit of Macron and Merkel to a migrant camp. Their presence has a high symbolic value to show that everything is under control. But who still wants to believe in this European family on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Probably not Albert, Nathalie's son, an NGO activist who arrives without warning. He, moreover, no longer believes in his mother.

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Two imprisoned brothers, with no dreams or realities, seek a bit of air to breathe. What must die suffocates. What wishes to live hopes. A tunnel opens in front of them. They fall into it, sink into it, forget themselves. A light envelops them, then eternity.

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Two men meet for a blind date in a dark apartment, according to an agreed arrangement. The lights come back on, Lucien and Anton confront their differences... On edge, a new scenario emerges.

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Is it possible to replicate the human brain on a computer? To connect it to machines? Research aimed at understanding the functioning of our biological brain is being matched by spectacular progress in the development of artificial intelligence.

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After their house burns down, 18-year-old Sofia and her mother Carla have to live together in a small room at The Little Swallow Hotel. Sofia explores the building and meets new inspiring people. A thousand opportunities seem to open up for her. Carla, on the other hand, has to get used to the idea of her daughter leaving. In this closed-door environment, mother and daughter try to find a new balance in their relationship.

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Facing exorbitant fees for sessions with his therapist, Rodrigo Muñoz finds a great economical use of resources in this self–dramatization which portrays the account of his depression. In confronting the pecuniary dimension of the day-to-day, Rodrigo ironically seizes upon film as a process of emancipation.

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Elena is the last one. Following her brother’s departure from Ticino, she remains alone with her mother in their large lakeside house. For her, it is not yet time to go but, already, she is imagining with nostalgia what she will foresake, carried away by her desire for discovery. Nikita Merlini captures the traces of what she leaves behind her in her gentle journey into adulthood.

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Philippe, a depressed young man, feels quite oppressed in his flat since his roommate has a new girlfriend. Irritated by her, Philippe destroys the fondue they were supposed to share. He finds himself wandering around the city, looking for someone to share his solitude. His nocturnal encounters will lead him to accept himself as he is.

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Leandre goes looking for a stranger named Tristan to give him some bad news about a mutual friend. However, when they meet, Leandre fails to deliver his message, which makes Tristan believe that they met by pure chance. They form a bond, but the true nature of what links them to the same boy remains ambiguous.

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Adri and Beamo are two brothers who like to hang out and challenge each other. When Adri asks his little brother to enter an abandoned house and bring back an object, the latter will make a strange discovery that will haunt their night.

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How does it feel to be alive? Bloc B is the setting for nine encounters, somewhere in the satellite city “la Bourdonnette”, in the outskirts of Lausanne. The film was written for some of their residents and their neighborhood. In order to know what it feels like to be alive.

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As winter sets in and P.A. sees the world shifting around him, he starts to observe strange phenomena in the environment. The changes are imperceptible at first, but gradually his whole world seems to be on the brink.

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A man releases a huge balloon in the dark night… In the south of France, two men lead us on a strange treasure hunt through crisscrossing roads, armed with GPSes and maps. An observational and absurd road movie, where it is a matter of climbing up trees, celestial explosions and mysterious links between men separated by hundreds of kilometres.

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After the death of her father, Selina Weber seeks refuge in Pompei, a city still crossed by phantoms of those struck by the eruption of Vesuvius two thousand years ago. He had filmed her as a child, as a teenager. She had filmed him in the prime of life. In her thoughts, images of their trips surface—brilliant and precious fragments of summers spent together—but also those of the illness, in the cold light of the hospital. Filmed archives and streams of consciousness seem to become one.

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Seventeen-year-old Mathieu Reymond lies brutally battered and raped in a field of reeds. It is only after his release from hospital that the memories come back, unannounced and fragmentary, but still so precise that regular meetings with two police officers not only allow the perpetrator’s identikit image to take shape, but also the chronology of the crime itself.

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On February 27, 2009, pupil Benjamin Feller commits a crime which he has meticulously described beforehand in a diary entry. He goes to the post office to send the diary entry to his teacher before he shoots his parents and turns himself in to the police. His teacher Esther Fontanel tries to understand the events in retrospect. But as the journal’s addressee, she is increasingly targeted by the police herself.

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Five days before D-Day, the day of the last voyage of the Order of Sirius, a sect nestled in the Vaudoise Alps, Switzerland. Five days during which a community of 48 people, women, men, children, fed with esotericism and guided by a narcissistic guru, will test their faith and be deprived of their identity. Five days in which every gesture will be the last. Sirius is inspired by the massacre of the Order of the Solar Temple in 1994 in western Switzerland.

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A view of the religious tensions between Muslims and Buddhist through the portrait of the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, leader of anti-Muslim movement in Myanmar.

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A behind-the-scenes look at the of how the Paris Opera is run under the direction of Stephane Lissner.

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Two young boys have stolen some expensive scarves and are being pursued. To get out of town, they hijack a young lady’s vehicle. She ends up following them as they flee.

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David Miller wants to die and chooses assisted euthanasia. He planned everything: the place, the time and the manner. However, nothing goes right. With Esperanza, member of the association, and Tréplev, young prostitute, David embarks on his ultimate night with total strangers.

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A permission, an eternal return, it is in this suspended context, out of space and time, that the gathering of three young men happens, under the bright and suffocating lights of the bank district and the luxury boutiques of the city of Geneva, a symbol of a cold and radical social cleavage. Between masculinity, violence and ethic, everything seems to be made in order for the friends to deconstruct the universe, alone, at the top of the world.

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It is April 1974 and Julie Dujonc-Renens, young feminist journalist and the cunning Joseph-Marie Cauvin, leading reporter for the Swiss radio, have been sent to Portugal to investigate Switzerland’s aid to poor countries. Sparks fly during the bus trip with Bob, sound engineer approaching retirement. The projects financed by Switzerland prove to be calamitous and the workers’ revolution that suddenly breaks out doesn’t help, obliging our heroes to disregard first the radio’s management, and then their own codes of conduct.

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Two young men are playing in a bathtub. Then a third and fourth slip in to join them. They are called Émile and they are looking for their “perfect mother” when a fifth man arrives, the Émile who reconciles them all.

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Claude Goretta directed “L'invitation” in 1973. For filmmaker Lionel Baier, born in 1975, it is like a “travelling companion”, to adapt Serge Daney’s expression. He feels it is definitive proof that a Swiss can be deeply Chekhovian. The young filmmaker goes to Geneva to ask his elder how he achieved the whoosh of water effect in the film, why attention to detail matters so much, and how to film great actors such as François Simon. This encounter with Claude Goretta – but also with Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, Michel Robin and Frédérique Meininger – leads one of the greatest of Swiss filmmakers to open up about his work.

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August 1st, somewhere in the Aubonne countryside, Cécile and her ten-year-old daughter Marion have just acquired an old 1970’s Ford Taunus estate car. But the roads through the region at the heart of the north shore of Lake Geneva are much longer and strewn with pitfalls than would appear and their voyage is delayed incessantly. Perhaps, however, the way ahead will open up for Cécile and Marion once the problems have been solved. As far as the moon.

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Looking for a flat to rent, Benoit is staying temporarily at a hotel. Having seen that flats are more easily rented to couples than singles, Benoit comes up with the plan to have Jeanne, his neighbour, act as his girlfriend. Through this role play, Benoit will fall under the charm of this young lady who is keen on horse betting, and will let himself be led into an amorous bet that will ruin him.

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Since he is 9 years old, David Miller has known the date of the day he dies. As it nears, he meets those he cares about for the last time, obsessed by the idea of learning how to tie a tie and by the the fall into water of the Quebecker filmmaker Claude Jutra. Shot with a cellphone over a decade, from Lausanne to Ouagadougou, Low Cost (Claude Jutra) is a small fiction about the market value of a human life in a time when everything is discounted. Life is priceless, death, however, negotiates…

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