Loving Highsmith by Eva Vitija
“The Swiss Films Previews have proven to be a great opportunity for Swiss works-in-progress to be first seen internationally,” commented Swiss Films’ Andreas Bühlmann after the presentation of five new and upcoming docs during the Swiss Films Preview at Visions du Réel Industry.
“This years’ selection reflects the diversity of creative documentaries from Switzerland from very personal, intimate stories (My Old Man), to the necessity of social and political change (Women’s Africa), a thoroughly researched artist portrait (Loving Highsmith) and about the current Covid pandemic with its impact on couples (I Coroneri).”
“We were happy to present with this hybrid format an array of projects from upcoming promising talents (Lux) as well as from well-established filmmakers and production companies ready for the international markets. In these times of virtual festivals, as a promotion agency it is important to keep on talking about upcoming projects even more,” he added.
Loving Highsmith, directed by Eva Vitija and produced by Ensemble Film GmbH, is based on the late, great Patricia Highsmith’s personal writings and accounts of her family and lovers, and casts new light on the famous thriller writer’s life and oeuvre, permeated by themes of love and its defining influence on identity.
The film is budgeted at €1,020,000, with 93% in place from a plethora of Swiss and German funders, financiers and broadcasters. The production team is eyeing up a Summer 2021 release and were looking for sales representation at VdR.
“Patricia Highsmith has this mysterious fascination for a lot of people, also for me, that as soon as you [think you] know who she is she completely slips your grip and is somebody completely different,” commented director Vitija. “This is like her most famous character Tom Ripley, a completely unscrupulous but very charming killer. I immediately fell in love with the person hiding behind the famous crime writer, because when I began to dive into her published writings I discovered this very romantic woman that astonished me a lot, who had to conceal her sexual identity and her very lively love life.”
“Highsmith herself will be mostly present in the film through her own quotes from the unpublished diaries that lead through the film,” Vitija added. “A voice-over read by an actress and will give an authentic and very unknown poetic voice to bring to life this most fascinating female writer of the 20th century.”
In I Coroneri, a couple are impacted both by the lockdown and the discovery of a betrayal. The impossibility of leaving each other is combines ‘with the dystopia of reality’, and the whole thing is set against the backdrop of Rome, both empty and beautiful.
“There’s a game of mirrors between my house in Rome where Daniel and I are together, but distant and isolated, and the world outside, which is isolated because of the pandemic,” commented screenwriter Laura Marzi of their lockdown dilemma.
“It was a life which is redefined by a new set of rules and problems caused by the pandemic – this (situation) shows how fragile the relationship was before,” director Daniel Kemeny (sòne, Visions du Réel 2020) replied. “Outside of the house Daniel goes to find a situation where he feels better, where he feels more safe, alone, without anybody else. In Rome he finds images that symbolically represent their feelings, but actually the landscape of lockdown is not seen as picturesque…”
After producing sòne, producer Michela Pini (Cinédokké Sagl) was prepared to give the director “carte blanche.” “He really demonstrated not only to be an artist but also a great director with a strong author vision,” she says. The budget is €80,000, with €55,000 in place. The expected release is August 2021.
Filmmaker Steven Vit observes his father Rudy’s transition into retirement in the feature doc My Old Man. Shot over three years, the 90-minute, €253,000 budget film (89% of budget in place) will transport the viewer across three continents and “immerse us in unique worlds of contrasts, be it the bustling city of Tokyo, the skyline of Shanghai, the vast Canadian wilderness or the Swiss Alps.” The expected release date is March/April 2022.
“How well do you really know your own father?” director Vit asked rhetorically during his presentation. “That is the question I asked myself as I started with this project a couple of years ago. Having grown up in an ordinary family with a working dad and a stayhome mum I knew very little about how my father actually feels about things. As he was entering his last year of work I felt that that was the right moment to start changing that.”
Producer David Fonjallaz (Lomotion AG Filmproduktion) enthused about both director and subject alike. “First of all let me reassure you that Steven’s father Rudy is actually a great storyteller and that over the last three years Steven managed to capture moments of his life that are very touching without becoming sentimental, and also very intimate without being voyeuristic,” he said. “We strongly believe in the film’s potential to read a wide audience,” he said. “Rudy is representative of a whole generation of men that lead what we now might call an old-fashioned way of life, with his job as an essential component of his identity. This process of reinventing himself is a challenge more and more people in the western society are facing.”
The logline of Lux reads like a disaster movie. In early fall 2019, Geneva faces an unprecedented security crisis – the imminent attack by an anti-capitalist terrorist group known as the Global Liberation Front (GLF). The Swiss army is immediately called upon to assist the police force in containing the threat to Calvin’s city as quickly as possible.
But what the filmmakers are describing is a massive army simulation exercise that took place in Geneva from 1st to 10th October 2019. Ten days during which 1,500 soldiers took part in a life-size game, between city and countryside, to tackle a fictitious threat, much of which was recorded by filmmakers Raphaël Dubach and Mateo Ybarra of Jeunes Sauvages. The film is fully financed (€80,000) with an expected release date of August 2021.
“With this film we wanted to show the Swiss Army in a way that it has never ever been seen before, in a raw, frontal and immersive approach that really questions the credibility of this army in a contemporary context,” said co-director Dubach.
“We really tried to show the gap there is between this fictional scenario and the reality on the field, and to do so we built all of the movie in the boundaries between what is real and what is not real,” he added. “We added a lot of science fiction-like elements in the narrative structure of the film to help the viewer take a step back from what he is seeing and to be more critical.”
“While exploring the ambiguous relationship between reality and fiction, Lux offers a poetic desire to draw the viewers away from preconceived ideas in the heart of one of the most unique armies in the world and one of the most controversial institutions in Switzerland,” the logline confirms.
Women’s Africa, directed by acclaimed Swiss-Algerian filmmaker Mohammed Soudani, is described as ‘a film that will make us understand that the future of Africa belongs to women.’
The synopsis reads of ‘a trip that will take us to 7 African countries (Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, Mozambique, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Burundi) to meet powerful women determined to do everything in their power to offer a better future to the African people.’
Speaking to Business Doc Europe in August 2020, further Soudani explained the film’s rationale. “I am an African who lives far from Africa but I have it at heart…In Africa there are some men that we call ‘cravatés’ because they wear ties but they don’t do much else, and above all they don’t do anything for their country. I think instead that African women will change this continent.”
“We can no longer bear to see young men leaving Africa to come to Europe, at the mercy of politicians like Salvini [Italian leader of far-right party Lega Nord],” he continued. “Africa cannot continue to be at the mercy of everyone. To give dignity to Africans, Africa must begin to offer a better life to its young people so that they are not forced to leave. African women play a fundamental role in this.”
At the beginning of 2020, the film’s producer Tiziana Soudani, wife of Mohammed and founder of the Swiss company Amka Film, sadly passed away after a long illness. Director Mohammed paid a long and emotional tribute to her.
“Tiziana was the machine that started this movie. It was she who, after reading the biography of Michelle Obama, an African-American woman who was a source of great inspiration for her, pushed me to think of a film about African women who fight for the progress of the continent at all levels,” he commented.
“Tiziana was a woman and, as such, had a special sensitivity and had many female friends, both in Europe and in Africa. This film will be dedicated to her. She was the one who pushed me to go to Africa for the shooting, partly hiding the gravity of her illness from me so that I could finish my film. I can say that she is really the co-author of [Women’s Africa].”
“Tiziana is no longer here today but she is the one who still guides me and encourages me every day to go on with this project. We’ve always done things together. I discussed all my projects with her and her feedback was important to me. Even when we didn’t agree on something, we always found a solution to make the films we wanted to make.”
