Heimatland (2015)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2015
	Director: Lisa Blatter, Gregor Frei, Benny Jaberg, Carmen Jaquier, Jonas Meier, Tobias Nölle, Lionel Rupp, Mike Scheiwiller, Jan Gassmann, Michael Krummenacher
	Actors: Luna Arzoni, Nicolas Bachmann, Egon Betschart
	Country: CH, D
	Genre: Drama
	Conditions of visioning: 08.07.2016, Cinema Bio, NIFFF2016
Synopsis: A mysterious cloud forms and expands over Switzerland, threatening to cause a storm of a scale never seen before. Some inhabitants struggle with their daily life while others flee to the neighbouring countries.
Review: An original and ambitious undertaking by a group of young directors that recruited in total ten people with ten ideas to incorporate into this movie. Unlike other movies resulting from such a collaboration, Heimatland is not composed of ten separate segments, but the directors actually all participated to the genesis of the storyline, and each put in image the fate of one character (or group), all seamlessly edited into a single coherent movie. For example we follows a Croatian taxi driver, a young couple, two sisters, a banking assistant, a policewomen, a group of right wing extremists... and see them react differently to the threat. The movie was designed to convey a political message, and it is not done with subtlety but the directors presenting the movie at the NIFFF told us it was intentional. Indeed, a parallel is easily traced when Swiss citizens migrate to the neighbour EU countries and the Union closes its borders to them when they get too numerous. During the Q&A following the movie the directors also told us that they wanted to show Swiss people going down from the pedestal they are living on since the country is living off money from past and present conflicts around the world. Such ambitions for the movie made it of course difficult to finance but they pulled it out and released it in German-speaking Switzerland (8 directors out of 10 are from that side of the country), now hoping for a national release.
Rating: 6 /10