Throughout history, there have always been refugees. They used to come from places closer to home. In the last years of WW II, the family of Swiss director Markus Imhoof, a small boy of four years at that time, took in Giovanna, an undernourished eight-year-old Italian street child as part of a limited-term program for […]
The Great Illusion (1937), the famous work of Jean Renoir, which confirmed the myth of the hospitable Switzerland, Imhoof offers smaller works that show cracks in the too optimistic monument base.
„If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.” – Einstein
Since 1886, there has been a weather-station master at the summit of the mountain. He telegraphs his daily measurements into the valley from where they are transmitted to Rome, Paris, Berlin and Vienna.
A documentary about the house in Milan, where Imhoof had his studio, a typical Milanese “casa di righiera”, where each room has its own front door to the common gallery in the courtyard, a joyful version of the prison architecture.
Spring 1912. On her honeymoon on a boat bound for India, Georgette wakes up to the fact that her husband has mostly married her because of her father’s factory.
After the play “Eisenwichser” by Heinrich Henkel. For the Swiss-German version, Imhoof worked undetected as Eisenwichser in the underground canals of the Sulzer company in Winterthur.
Incessant snowdrifts cut a village off the environment before tourists and a group of soldiers with their sick horses can escape from the valley. The first avalanche has covered roads and railway tracks. Men and cattle are crowded in the few still safe houses and in the too small hotel.
The movie is based on the autobiographical novel «The Journey» of Bernward Vesper. He is the son of a famous nazi-poet and life’s companion of the female terrorist Gudrun Ensslin.
During the last war a randomly assembled group of refugees succeeded in secretly passing the borders of Switzerland.
Princess searches for her prince and gets caught up in turmoil of Metropolis.
Parody of the story of Wilhelm Tell. Gessler as a professor, Tell as a freedom-fighting student. Libidinous revolution in the Gymnasium.
To prepare this film Markus Imhoof worked for two months as an undercover jail guard in the prison Thorberg in Bern, noting his observations in a diary.
OR YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT – The movie is about gluttony, with food as an example of other metabolic processes. The starting point of the playful collage is the energy law: “All natural processes are only energy transformations, but never energy production or energy destruction.”
The documentary produced with the financial support of the cavalry associations draws a critical picture of the mounted troops. The film raises the question of whether this type of weapon is still timely or just an unrealistic symbol of Swiss military will.
The documentary deals with the problem of the Swiss penal system. The film tries on the basis of a single case, to show the mechanisms to which a prisoner is exposed in jail.
“The sixteen-year-old, who breaks out of his family on his birthday and crashes his father’s car, is a figure of Markus Imhoof’s constant concern with the figure of the father, be it physically or personified in the figures of the organized Society, the prescriptive state, the dictating group.