Swiss Projects Offer Wide Range at Venice Gap-Financing Showcase

Both well-established and up-and-coming Swiss filmmakers are taking part in the Venice Film Festival’s Production Bridge industry strand, where Switzerland will be one of the country’s in focus at the Gap-Financing Market.

Seven Swiss projects and co-productions are among the total of 38 fiction and documentary works featured in the Venice Production Bridge’s Gap-Financing Market lineup, selected from a record-breaking 370-plus submissions.

Spanning 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  and cross-class romance, murder mystery, apocalyptic sci-fi and the artistic process.

Among them are works by Flurin Giger, who premiered his 2016 short “Ruah” in Venice and 2018’s “Schächer” in Cannes; award-winning filmmaker Stéphanie Argerich with her first narrative feature; Valentin Merz, who picked up a first feature prize in Locarno in 2022 for “De noche los gatos son pardos”; Ursula Meier, whose credits include the 2012 and 2022 Berlin-premiering, prize-winning works “Sister” and “The Line“; and Kaveh Bakhtiari, who follows up his acclaimed 2013 Cannes doc “Stop-Over” with his scripted feature debut.

Giger arrives with “A Year Without Summer,” 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.

“What immediately drew us to this project first was Flurin,” Beauvoir Films producer Cécile Tollu-Polonowski tells Variety. “We had seen both his shorts, ‘Ruah’ in Venice and ‘Schächer’ in Cannes Critics’ 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’s one of the most exciting up-and-coming directors we know, and honestly his debut feature fits perfectly into Beauvoir’s line-up as we nourish the same desire for cinema.”

The project stands apart through the extraordinary subject itself, Tollu-Polonowski adds. “It 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.

“It’s a story that’s completely fascinating and evokes so many images. It’s 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.”

Currently 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.

Beyond the historical setting, the story also offers frightening parallels to the present day, Tollu-Polonowski notes: “A world thrown off balance by something invisible, people trying to make sense of a changed climate. It doesn’t feel like a period piece.”

After winning acclaim for her 2012 documentary “Bloody Daughter,” about her parents, renowned pianists Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich, Argerich returns with narrative feature “Kyushu Moon,” produced by Geneva-based Intermezzo Films and Les Films du Bélier in Paris.

The 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’s language, unexpected feelings arise.

Argerich has re-teamed with Intermezzo Films’ Luc Peter and Katia Monla, who also produced “Bloody Daughter.”

“We 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,” says Monla.

“What drew us to ‘Kyushu Moon’ was 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.

“It 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.”

“Kyushu Moon” is set to begin its six-week shoot in Beppu, Japan, in October.

The Swiss projects in the Venice Gap-Financing Market also include:

“Chocolat Amer,” by Valentin Merz
Cinédokké Sagl, Andrea Film (Switzerland), Unafilm (Germany)

Sadek, a young Tunisian in Zurich, becomes the lover of a chocolate heir while the world’s cacao is dying. The closer he comes to the Perret family and their synthetic chocolate, the more he transforms — until his body and his sense of self begin to slip away from him.

“Quiet Land,” by Ursula Meier
Bande à part Films (Switzerland), Paradise City (France)

Ageing 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?

“Salut Robert,” by Laura Israel
Correspondent Productions (U.S.), Mira Films (Switzerland), 4 A 4 Productions (France)

A 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.

“The Rope,” by Alberto Fasulo
Nefertiti Film (Italy), Beauvoir Films (Switzerland)

When 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.

“The Smuggler,” by Kaveh Bakhtiari
Beauvoir Films (Switzerland),  Homemade Films (Greece), TS Productions (France)

Ali, 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 “drew me to create a sober narrative capable of capturing the density of the circumstances,” says Bakhtiari, an Iranian native and exile himself who previously explored the undocumented migrant experience in “Stop-Over.”