30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Marco lives and works in a village in the mountains of Canton Uri. Sturdy, tanned, with hands marked by fatigue, at thirty he lives a tender love affair with Anne and affection for Julia, the daughter Anne had with another man. Life in the Swiss mountains is depicted with rough simplicity. The long sequences capture the repetition of daily gestures such as splitting wood, hay sawn with a scythe, heavy stones dragged across the lawn, and the violent mounting of the bull. Commenting, as if to suggest a need for emotional detachment, are the harmonies of a “mountain” choir that sings, posing, on a meadow or on the bridge in the middle of a woods. Marco will discover that fate has its own plans. His life undergoes a change that little by little will make him lose everything. Anne stays close to him with tenderness, but the director does not hide her fatigue and her anger from us. The non-professional actors, who speak the strict Swiss-German language, give the characters and story an engaging realism.

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  Michael Koch

  Michael Koch is a director and screenwriter from Lucerne. His was trained at the  Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. His graduation film, Polar (2009), received a special mention at the Berlin Film Festival and the German Short Film Award in Gold. His first feature film, Marija (2016), earned an award at the Locarno Film Festival. His second film, Drii winter (2022), premiered at the Berlin Film Festival where it received a Special Mention. He is a teacher at the Cologne International Film School.