alr

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.

Part of film series

Read more

Rituals of Desire:
The Films of Daniel Schmid

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Melville et Cie.

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more

The Shochiku Centennial Collection

Read more

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada