Modern Times

New technologies are transforming a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland. Josephine, a young factory worker, produces the unrest wheel, swinging in the heart of the mechanical watch. Exposed to new ways of organizing money, time and labor, she gets involved with the local anarchist movement.

A mass panic at a vast subway station somewhere in the Northwestern hemisphere leaves its survivors perplexed. What happened to trigger the stampede? At the peak of the rush hour the film goes on a journey into the landscape of public fears.

Using her skills of selling Internet and insurance deals, young call center employee Alice calls up elderly strangers and pretends to be their granddaughter in urgent need of money. As this trick quickly makes her rich, the film observes people and places in Zurich, all mysteriously connected to Alice’s business.

As snow falls over a city, people share secret tricks with each other. Like how to kiss somebody and make them disappear, or having thoughts which are unrecognizable to machines.

Two teenagers' lives are brought together through internet webcams. Anton's desire is awakened after discovering Lenny's personal video blog on YouTube. Away from the screen, Anton wanders through the big city, wondering whether his virtual meeting with Lenny has a place in the real world.

In 1887, Peter Kropotkin stayed briefly in the Swiss Jura, fiefdom of the watchmaking industry and epicentre of the international anarchist movement. He would retain a strong impression of his encounter with the highly organised local workers, whose “equalitarian relationships and independent thought” he would praise in his diary. 140 years after the “conversion” of this man who was to theorise libertarian communism a little later on, Cyril Schäublin restages fragments of this diary read in Russian, in the current setting. A place in which his ancestors, who worked from generation to generation in the watchmaking manufactures of this region until their closure, still survive.