In 2022, during a discussion at the Solothurn Film Festival, director Denis Rabaglia (a native speaker of French who makes his films in Italian) highlighted the generosity of the Swiss production system, which encourages filmmakers to work in a national language other than their own. A good example of this is Pierre Monnard, a French speaker who currently lives in Zurich.
To national audiences, Monnard’s name is associated with German-language productions: the cop show Wilder, set in the Bernese Oberland, on which he served as director of the first two seasons; the drama Needle Park Baby, based on the novel of the same name and a huge hit in Swiss cinemas, where it played for roughly two months before the first Covid lockdown in early 2020 (it was then re-released after theaters re-opened); and Neumatt, the first Swiss series ever acquired by Netflix for international distribution, about a family struggling to keep their farm.
A similar premise sets the tone for his new film Bisons, which debuted in Solothurn and is now playing in Rotterdam’s Harbour section (“It won’t be the same version”, he jokingly told TFV after the world premiere). Two estranged brothers have to figure out how to repay a huge debt left behind by their late father, otherwise they will lose the farm within a month. The solution: the more physically imposing of the two, a key figure in the local wrestling community, will have to compete in illegal fight clubs across the border, in France.
Along with the 2022 thriller series Hors Saison, about a cross-border murder investigation, it’s Monnard’s return to working in French after many years in the German-speaking realm. Not that it was by design: the project was first pitched to him in 2017 by producer Xavier Grin who, like the director, hails from Châtel-Saint-Denis in the Canton of Fribourg and felt an affinity for the material (“Most of my family is in the farming business”, says Monnard). It then took a few years for everything to fall into place.
Still, returning to his mother tongue on set was something the filmmaker embraced wholeheartedly: “It has a different flavor. It also changes the way I work with actors. I feel more comfortable making suggestions and improvising. There’s also improvisation when I work in German, but on those occasions it stems from how the actors are feeling, whereas with French it comes from me.” He adds a culinary comparison: “It’s like when a chef cooks in his own home instead of the restaurant. It’s more direct, driven by personal hunger.”
While Needle Park Baby was a very female-driven story (with Sarah Spale, who also stars in Wilder, as the drug-addicted mother of a young girl), Bisons focuses on male bonding, sometimes in a very visceral manner. The fight scenes are brutal (“I wanted them to come from the gut”, Monnard explains), and were enhanced by the real-life martial arts experience of Maxime Valvini, who makes his professional acting debut as the protagonist Steve alongside experienced performer Karim Barras sd the prodigal son Joël.
The director is already hard at work on his new project, Winter Palace, the first Swiss Netflix Original, currently filming in the Simplon area in Canton Valais (the Bisons screenings in Solothurn and Rotterdam were strategically scheduled on weekends to accommodate his professional commitments). But he’s far from done promoting the film, which opens domestically in February and is also up for six Swiss Film Prizes, including Best Fiction Feature Film. On the prospect of finding a larger audience, he has only one thing to say: “I hope viewers will fall in love with these characters the same way I did.”
