La Maternité des HUG

Portrait of the German and Jewish painter who lived during the war in the south of France, in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where she painted 769 gouaches which recount her life, from her childhood, the suicide of her mother, her relationship to her father, to her mother-in-law, the singer Paula Lindberg, to a teacher whom she was secretly in love with, her flight to France, the reunion with her grandparents, until her arrest by the Gestapo who sent her to Auschwitz where she was assassinated in 1943.

The first sequence shows us an elderly woman in the process of taking a test which seems extremely simple. However, the patient cannot remember the words she has just read. This loss of memory is one of the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. With patience and respect, Richard Dindo meets people suffering from this scourge. In the course of these testimonies, “La maladie de la mémoire” makes the difficult confrontation with the gulf of forgetfulness particularly sensitive. This film modifies our intimite relationship with the past, the present, but also with the future.

A “filmic re-reading” of Max Frisch's novella Montauk (1974) and of excerpts from his published diaries. It is neither a biographical portrait of Frisch – who was one of the greatest 20th century Swiss writers – nor a filmed adaptation of the novel. Instead, Dindo returns to the locations the author describes in his texts, searching for traces of past events that may turn out to have been more imagined than real.

The Grüninger case from Switzerland. This is a documentary about a police officer who showed civil courage back in the forties when he led many refugees fleeing German Nazi terror immigrate to Switzerland, although he was advised not to do so. Grüninger later was sued by the state of Switzerland, lost his job and died in the early seventies. The film constructs a just lawsuit with eye-witnesses and thus fully legitimates what Grüninger did.

The tragic life of 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, as told by characters that knew him.

This documentary about the canton of Geneva’s University Hospital focuses less on the technology of modern medicine, or the ubiquity of doctors, than on the destiny of ordinary people: the hospital as a shrine of humanity.

A documentary about Che Guevara in Bolivia, based upon his journal listing daily agendas

A three-part documentary about four young men who were active members of the Zurich youth movement in the early 1980s and died tragically as a result of “accidents” with the involvement of the police. The exuberant Dani and Michi stole a motorbike to go on a joyride; a police car gave chase and caused their fatal crash. Renato, a young junkie raised in orphanages, was shot by the police while driving a stolen car. Max, an innocent bystander at a youth demonstration, was clubbed on the head by a police officer, and later died of complications caused by his head injuries. Taken together, these three incidents reflect the tense and violent atmosphere of the time and the conflict between repressive authority and a young generation desperate for freedom

During World War II 17 men were put to death by Swiss bureaucracy. The reconstruction of the case of Ernst S. fueled a controversy about collective guilt, double standards and the role of Switzerland in the war.

A documentary about the French writer Jean Genet and his relations with the Palestinian revolution. One day after the September 1982 massacre at the refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut, Genet visits the camp. Suffering from throat cancer and having written nothing in years, Genet begins to write on the threshold of his death about this disturbing new experience. It leads to his last book, entitled “Un captif amoureux” in which Genet reflects on the Palestinian revolution, its defeat, and the loss of one’s homeland. In this film a young French woman of Algerian origin who is reading the book returns to the landscapes of the Palestinian resistance and the refugee camps full of exiles, in search of Genet.

A fictionalised documentary about the great Japanese poet Bashô (1644–1694), the spiritual father of haiku poetry. A monk, portraying the poet, journeys through Japan, following Bashô's journal and writing many of his haikus. A ruminant, poetic, Zen Buddhist observation of nature – a return to the lost paradise of unspoilt nature.

A man turning 50 (Walter Faber) narrates his liaisons with three women: Hanna, who was pregnant and left him many years ago in Zurich; Ivy, who broke up with him recently in New York; Sabeth who is 20 and whom he just met on a boat to Europe. Sabeth and the narrator travel to France, Italy and Greece. But who is Sabeth? What does she feel towards the narrator? What does he feel towards her? The entire movie is shot in subjective view (we only see what the narrator sees); there are no dialogues, just his post-synchronised voice.

In southern California's Mojave Desert, members of the Mars Society - a loosely connected group of people who live modestly but spend time planning a better life on the Red Planet - don homemade spacesuits and wander the Mojave, conjuring a dry Martian landscape.

A documentary film about Paul Gauguin’s final years in Tahiti and on the Marquesas Islands. The filming of his paintings is set in the magnificent oceanic landscape from which they emerged, commented on by Gauguin himself with quotes taken from his autobiographical works and letters. The film tells the moving story of the famous French painter, a misunderstood artist and rebel, who advocated returning to Nature, who forewarned that industrialism would destroy the earth and who clashed with Catholic missionaries because of the extinction of the Maori culture and religion.

Everyday life in a house where death is omnipresent, but in which, in contrast to a retirement home, mainly younger people live. Bailey House is a former hotel where 44 AIDS patients live. A refuge for a fraction of people suffering from AIDS in the city of New York, where they find shelter, supervised by a competent team. Fellow sufferers, perhaps even friends in the face of a disease that is stigmatized by society and means social isolation for most of those affected. People of different social backgrounds meet here. However, the largest proportion is made up of young black formerly drug addicts. Bailey House, the last stop in their young life, is often even the first real home, in most cases also the most beautiful place where they have lived so far.

In 1941, the writers Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet fled the Nazi-occupied zone of France, arriving in Nice. There they met and befriended Henri Matisse. Aragon resolved to write a book about the great painter, but it wasn't until 1970, just after Elsa's death, that he finally completed "Henri Matisse, roman".