The Only Ones

Maria and Satindar love each other, but his alcohol addiction fatally prevents a shared future.

Pensioner Roli comes to Fareed's assistance when the Syrian refugee is faced with the burial of his Muslim wife. Together they stumble into a bewildering forest of Swiss bureaucracy to which Roli finds beautifully simple answer.

In a society marked by gendered violence, nine-year-old Arushi and Milena, twenty-one, reclaim space through Kalari—the world’s oldest martial art. The film follows their fight for self-empowerment and the freedom to be the women they chose to be.

In the film, Klopfenstein portrays a metaphorical renovation of the burned-down church of his past in and with cinema. As tools, he merely has his computer and files of his own films, as well as masses of faces long gone and places razed from memory. One drifts deliciously with Klopfenstein through a super-edit of his own oeuvre, removed from established modes of this type of filmmaking and instead functioning in an intimate and poignant expression, where fleeting gestures can unleash avalanches of unexpected memories.