Oliva Oliva

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. A group of friends get together to make a film about their experiences growing up in suburban Switzerland.

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. Together with a few friends (among them famous Swiss actor Stefan Kurt), director Aron Nick's father and uncle shoot the idealistic Super 8 film "Dr Tscharniblues" ("The Tscharni Blues") – a wild, unvarnished self-portrait of their generation. 40 years later, Nick gathers the friends at Tscharnergut and asks what has happened to them and their ideals in the meantime. What have the achieved? What have they lost? Past, present, and future clash and form a journey of personal disappointments, hopes, and a collective search for identity. In "Tscharniblues II," Aron Nick discovers a kind of friendship that can weather anything.

When Spanish Civil War ends in 1939, some of the women who played a leading role in the creative and literary boom known as Generation of 1927, stay in Spain, freely or not, sacrificing the spirit that had enlightened them, adapting themselves —or pretending to do so— to the new feminine role imposed by the victors, who were determined to cage these free souls at home, to live just as wives and mothers.

Spain, 1997. The story of twelve days in July during which Basque society left indifference and fear behind and faced the threat of the terrorist group ETA.

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.

Actor Jeremy Irons embarks on an epic journey through the halls of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, two hundred years after its inauguration, along corridors where thousands of masterpieces of all time tell the lives of rulers and common people, and tales about times of war and madness and times of peace and happiness; because, as Goya said, imagination, the mother of the arts, produces impossible monsters, but also unspeakable wonders.

This short, started early on into sobriety, finished about nine months in, is a collage of diaries and notes, collected from within addiction and into recovery.

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

A cinematic essay interweaving private archive images and a mixture of reflective, speculative and poetic intertitles that, like “an old movie from the 20th century”, invites us to meditate on what Des Pallières once liked to call “our old homeland”.