Schmid’s love affair with opera and its extraordinary practitioners surfaces in this film, for which he is perhaps best known in the U.S. Tosca’s Kiss is a playful and poignant documentary of Casa Verdi, the Milanese retirement home for opera stars founded in 1902 by Giuseppe Verdi and originally supported by his royalties. Not wanting to make a simple document of the world he saw there, Schmid found a form for his film in the feelings he developed for his subjects: "In Tosca’s Kiss we fell incredibly in love with all of [the residents], and those emotions were somehow communicated in the movie.