A major auteur in Europe but relatively unknown in the U.S., Swiss director Daniel Schmid has fashioned a unique and fanciful body of films over the last thirty years that is ripe for rediscovery. After studying at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin from 1966–1969, Schmid began his film career in association with the New German Cinema movement. Like the work of his friends Werner Schroeter and Rosa von Praunheim, Schmid’s films possessed, from the outset, an operatic sensibility. His remains a cinema of playfulness and longing, of voluptuousness and strong feeling, equal parts illusion and delusion. Unswayed by social or cinematic trends, Schmid has steadfastly produced an imaginative string of fiction films, documentaries, and opera productions—works suffused with sensuality and elements of melodrama and underscored by what critic Amy Taubin has called an "ironically modernist intelligence." As Schmid himself has stated, "I believe that people have a need for mythical forms, mysterious images, atavistic fairy tales, and magical symbols that take them back to the hidden memories of their childhood and their culture."