For its 2024 edition, the Cannes Marché du Film chose Switzerland as its Country of Honor.
As such, the promotional agency Swiss Films has set up various activities in partnership with the country’s Federal Office of Culture as well as the public broadcaster SRG SSR, whose regional units are key elements when it comes to financing most Swiss productions. For the duration of the Marché, attendees got to attend various talks, including one about the festival landscape in Switzerland featuring Giona Nazzaro (Locarno), Emilie Bujès (Visions du Réel), Anaïs Emery (Geneva), Christian Jungen (Zurich) and Pierre-Yves Walder (Neuchâtel).
According to Nazzaro, who spoke to The Film Verdict over the phone, Switzerland is a very rich nation in terms of production (around 80 projects per year, many of them international co-productions), and there’s been an evolution when it comes to talent behind the camera. He should know: prior to becoming the Artistic Director of Locarno, Nazzaro kept track of Swiss cinema trends as the General Delegate of the International Critics Week in Venice and as a member of the Visions du Réel selection committee.
What is missing, he opines, is a contemporary filmmaker capable of embodying the Swiss cinematic identity. “There hasn’t really been one since Fredi M. Murer and the Groupe 5,” he says referring to one of the major Swiss-German filmmakers as well as a French-speaking group that came to define the country’s output in the 1970s. “We need someone today who can convey the image of Switzerland on the screen, the way Fellini signified and signifies Italy.”
There is, of course, plenty of potential, in the shape of emerging directors such as Claude Barras (whose sophomore feature Sauvages is one of this year’s Special Screenings), Cyril Schäublin, the Zürcher brothers, Carmen Jaquier, and more. Stéphane Gobbo, a film critic and Arts Editor for the French-Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps, shares this view, and adds that there’s a major asset in the current filmic landscape: filmmakers associated with the diaspora, like Helene Naveriani, whose films are co-productions between Georgia and Switzerland, and Andreas Fontana, who was born in Geneva and works in South America.
However, says Gobbo, there is also a downside associated with Switzerland’s multicultural nature. “Because we have four national languages, three of which are used for major productions and generally aimed at their own linguistic markets, there’s less of a unified identity to promote, unlike what Unifrance does, for example.”
In fact, while documentaries tend to travel well nationwide, fiction films are not readily available in theaters across the entire country. (A notable recent exception is the hit comedy Bon Schuur Ticino, a satire about the country’s multilingualism). They do tend to find their audience later, thanks to streaming platforms like Play Suisse, which is free of charge and offers a wide array of films and series from all over Switzerland, subtitled – and sometimes dubbed – in all national languages (German, French, Italian, and Rumantsch).
This is something Netflix has paid attention to. After acquiring Michael Steiner’s Wolkenbruch in 2018, they helped finance his crime comedy Early Birds, which played at the Zurich Film Festival last September and is now available on the service as a Netflix Original (the first original Swiss series, Winter Palace, is currently in post-production). This also overcomes a barrier when it comes to Swiss-German titles, which do not generally play in cinemas in Austria and Germany because local audiences are not keen on subtitles, which are required for the various dialects.
Then again, such a fragmented context is not necessarily a liability. Andreas Bühlmann, Head of Festivals and Markets for Swiss Films, dispels that notion via email: “The international attention is generally speaking and compared to similar sized markets quite prominent and good – there was no majority co-production in the Cannes Competition for years, for sure. But it is not to be forgotten that Swiss films are each year present at A-Festivals from Sundance and Berlin to Cannes, Venice, Locarno, San Sebastian, Mar del Plata and Tallinn. It is up to the decision-makers to select what they like. Swiss film making is not as fragile as the domestic market thinks.”
On the subject of multiculturalism, he adds: “The diversity – formally, linguistically and story-wise – marks Swiss films abroad. There is not one single perception of the national filmmaking but rather several aspects, personal stories, perspectives on society from multicultural angles and points of view. We can say this is a problem, or we can literally just do what we did here in Cannes: celebrate the diversity and the strong co-productions with Swiss talent and creative teams – also in minority co-productions.” The latter includes, among other projects, two recent Canadian films, Until Branches Bend and Something You Said Last Night, which premiered at TIFF in 2022 and boasted the Ticino-based company Cinédokké among its producing entities.
And there’s certainly reason to be happy in the context of the Goes to Cannes initiative, an international showcase featuring work-in-progress titles presented by festivals from their country of origin. This year, the Solothurn Film Festival, the main event for Swiss film, was part of the lineup alongside Golden Horse (Taiwan), Adelaide (Australia), Tallinn Black Nights (Estonia), Queer Screen (Australia), Hong Kong’s Asia Film Financing Forum, and Ventana Sur (Argentina).
The award went to a Swiss film: Jacqueline Zünd’s Don’t Let the Sun (Catch You Crying), a dystopian drama about human connection. Planned for the end of the year, it’s likely to pop up in at least one of the fall festivals. But which one(s)? Will it premiere at home, or grab the attention of international programmers? Since it won Goes to Cannes, everyone is curious to see where it, and Swiss films in general, will go next.
