Jenatsch is an example of the sort of quasi-surreal world that Daniel Schmid’s films create, in which things happen outside reality but with a clear (and often romantic) logic. In the film, Schmid takes the story of the seventeenth-century Swiss freedom fighter Georg Jenatsch as the focus of an examination of time and our ability to navigate it. The time travel is initiated by a journalist who is investigating the site of Jenatsch’s grave when he finds himself literally drawn into the life of the martyred political hero. On the relativity of time, Schmid has noted: "At home, we have letters that go back to the seventeenth century. When you study them, you discover that basic things were not that different from today. Then, as now, everything sped by."