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Beresina, or the Last Days of Switzerland
(Beresina oder Die letzten Tage Der Schweiz)

Director in Person
Screening on Film
Directed by Daniel Schmid.
With Elena Panova, Martin Benrath, Geraldine Chaplin.
Switzerland, 1999, 35mm, color, 108 min.
German with English subtitles.

In his latest film, Schmid deploys his wickedly black humor to take aim at Swiss high society. Sweetly naïve Irina, a Russian call girl enamored of a "fairy-tale" Switzerland and counting the days until she receives her promised passport, boasts among her clientele the cream of Switzerland’s elite. When she learns she is in danger of being forced out of her adopted homeland, however, she fights back with a vengeful scheme borrowed from an obscure political group. The fate of the heroine, and indeed of the whole country, begins to take an unexpected turn.

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