{"id":126266,"date":"2026-09-05T09:13:33","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T09:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/126266\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T09:13:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T09:13:33","slug":"swiss-projects-offer-wide-range-at-venice-gap-financing-showcase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/126266\/","title":{"rendered":"Swiss Projects Offer Wide Range at Venice Gap-Financing Showcase"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBoth well-established and up-and-coming Swiss filmmakers are taking part in the Venice Film Festival<\/a>\u2019s Production Bridge industry strand, where Switzerland will be one of the country\u2019s in focus at the Gap-Financing Market.<\/p>\n

\n\tSeven Swiss projects and co-productions are among the total of 38 fiction and documentary works featured in the Venice Production Bridge<\/a>\u2019s Gap-Financing Market lineup, selected from a record-breaking 370-plus submissions.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpanning a wide range of subject matter and genre, the projects, in various stages of development, delve into the human toll of natural cataclysm, the forced criminality of migration, cross-cultural\u00a0 and cross-class romance, murder mystery, apocalyptic sci-fi and the artistic process.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmong them are works by Flurin Giger, who premiered his 2016 short \u201cRuah\u201d in Venice and 2018\u2019s \u201cSch\u00e4cher<\/a>\u201d in Cannes; award-winning filmmaker St\u00e9phanie Argerich with her first narrative feature; Valentin Merz, who picked up a first feature prize in Locarno in 2022 for \u201cDe noche los gatos son pardos<\/a>\u201d; Ursula Meier<\/a>, whose credits include the 2012 and 2022 Berlin-premiering, prize-winning works \u201cSister\u201d and \u201cThe Line<\/a>\u201c; and Kaveh Bakhtiari, who follows up his acclaimed 2013 Cannes doc \u201cStop-Over<\/a>\u201d with his scripted feature debut.<\/p>\n

\n\tGiger arrives with \u201cA Year Without Summer,\u201d produced by Geneva-based Beauvoir Films and Heimatfilm in Cologne. Set in 1816, it follows a peasant family in Europe whose existence is threatened when the skies suddenly darken and snow falls in the midst of summer. Unbeknownst to them, they are experiencing the effects of a catastrophic volcanic eruption in Indonesia.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat immediately drew us to this project first was Flurin,\u201d Beauvoir Films producer C\u00e9cile Tollu-Polonowski tells Variety. \u201cWe had seen both his shorts, \u2018Ruah\u2019 in Venice and \u2018Sch\u00e4cher\u2019 in Cannes Critics\u2019 Week, worked with him as an actor for another production, and there is a very particular handwriting to how he tells a story, a visual language that is his alone. He\u2019s one of the most exciting up-and-coming directors we know, and honestly his debut feature fits perfectly into Beauvoir\u2019s line-up as we nourish the same desire for cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe project stands apart through the extraordinary subject itself, Tollu-Polonowski adds. \u201cIt is based on a real event. In 1816, the world went dark after the eruption of volcano Tambora; it transformed the climate and reshaped lives across continents.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a story that\u2019s completely fascinating and evokes so many images. It\u2019s an event that has inspired artists long before us. It was during this year that brought so much death and misery that painters like Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner created some of their most celebrated works, skies with these strange, powerful colors, a rare kind of splendor. What they were painting was actually real, it was the atmospheric aftermath of the eruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCurrently being cast with a mix of professional and non-professional actors, the film will shoot in Rhaeto-Romanic, spoken in parts of southeastern Switzerland and northeastern Italy.<\/p>\n

\n\tBeyond the historical setting, the story also offers frightening parallels to the present day, Tollu-Polonowski notes: \u201cA world thrown off balance by something invisible, people trying to make sense of a changed climate. It doesn\u2019t feel like a period piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter winning acclaim for her 2012 documentary \u201cBloody Daughter,\u201d about her parents, renowned pianists Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich, Argerich returns with narrative feature \u201cKyushu Moon,\u201d produced by Geneva-based Intermezzo Films and Les Films du B\u00e9lier in Paris.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film centers on Sarah (played by Alba Rohrwacher), a recently divorced journalist who travels to Japan for a report on a retreat for men with relationship difficulties. There she meets Moroto (Ryo Kase), a 42-year-old virgin man. Despite not speaking each other\u2019s language, unexpected feelings arise.<\/p>\n

\n\tArgerich has re-teamed with Intermezzo Films\u2019 Luc Peter and Katia Monla, who also produced \u201cBloody Daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe love her energy, the way she looks at her surroundings with an attention to detail, and how, in the smallest unnoticed gesture, an emotion can surface, revealing our fragilities through a gaze that never judges, but simply recognizes our human failures,\u201d says Monla.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat drew us to\u00a0\u2018Kyushu Moon\u2019\u00a0was the way it questions our modern solitude: our loss of connection in a fast-paced society, our relationship to others, to another culture, at a time when everything seems to be pushing us toward individuality and a closing off from the world, from the other, from what is strange and foreign.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is, in that sense, a political film about a declining demographic left to fend for itself, and about how, in an unexpected setting, two people meet and find themselves able to imagine a relationship to the other again, just when everything seemed lost. But beneath its political and social surface, it remains, at heart, a deeply poetic romance laced with a touch of humor, a bridge between Europe and Asia, where two lost souls find a way to hope again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cKyushu Moon\u201d\u00a0is set to begin its six-week shoot in Beppu, Japan, in October.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Swiss projects in the Venice Gap-Financing Market<\/a> also include:<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cChocolat Amer,\u201d by Valentin Merz
Cin\u00e9dokk\u00e9 Sagl, Andrea Film (Switzerland), Unafilm (Germany)<\/p>\n

Sadek, a young Tunisian in Zurich, becomes the lover of a chocolate heir while the world\u2019s cacao is dying. The closer he comes to the Perret family and their synthetic chocolate, the more he transforms \u2014 until his body and his sense of self begin to slip away from him.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cQuiet Land,\u201d by Ursula Meier
Bande \u00e0 part Films (Switzerland), Paradise City (France)<\/p>\n

\n\tAgeing Montana Highway Patrol Officer Connor McCluskey is investigating two puzzling fatal car crashes. After being dismissed from the force, he worries the same fate may befall a woman who owns land in the same area. Has he uncovered an inexplicable criminal plot, or is he slowly losing his mind?<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSalut Robert,\u201d by Laura Israel
Correspondent Productions (U.S.), Mira Films (Switzerland), 4 A 4 Productions (France)<\/p>\n

\n\tA diaristic portrait of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, best known for his pictures of a postwar America riven by social and political discord, the film spans nearly half a century, assembled from unseen personal footage and home movies, offering a time capsule of a vibrant and tumultuous time in social and art history.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Rope,\u201d by Alberto Fasulo
Nefertiti Film (Italy), Beauvoir Films (Switzerland)<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Pawl chooses to awaken from the artificial sleep that the rest of humanity finds itself in, he is exiled back to a devastated planet, an uninhabited land shrouded in fog. There, he will rediscover the importance of bonds and hope for humankind.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Smuggler,\u201d by Kaveh Bakhtiari
Beauvoir Films (Switzerland), \u00a0Homemade Films (Greece), TS Productions (France) <\/p>\n

\n\tAli, a 16-year-old Afghan migrant, has found refuge in a salon in Athens, where he cuts hair and does odd jobs to survive, only to suddenly find himself propelled into the world of smugglers and counterfeiters. The humanity behind the darkness of forced criminal exploitation \u201cdrew me to create a sober narrative capable of capturing the density of the circumstances,\u201d says Bakhtiari, an Iranian native and exile himself who previously explored the undocumented migrant experience in \u201cStop-Over.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Both well-established and up-and-coming Swiss filmmakers are taking part in the Venice Film Festival\u2019s Production Bridge industry strand,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[41,17,61552,48726,61562,61563],"class_list":["post-126266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-swiss","tag-switzerland","tag-ursula-meier","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-venice-gap-financing-market","tag-venice-production-bridge"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/117217670329874055","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}