Masaki Hatsui

How a shy young man living off odd jobs became the funniest and most popular cartoonist in French-speaking Switzerland.

At dawn, a cannon shot shatters the plain. Horses gallop across the beaten earth. Eva, 21 years old, wants to join the hunters of the Imperial Guard, a Napoleonic regiment of historical re-enactment reserved for men. In her quest for romanticism, she hides her identity so that she can set foot in the stirrup, braving a 200-year-old ban. In this world of gunpowder and smoke, Eva discovers herself as she has always dreamed: a handsome soldier at the side of a beautiful princess.

Frank, el antihéroe de esta historia, en muchos sentidos trágico pero ante todo extremadamente real, se camufla a la perfección en esta decoración de belleza impersonal. Su vida está consagrada únicamente al trabajo. Cada uno de sus gestos está escrupulosamente programado, marcado por una rutina que se convierte en una obsesión. En su vida no hay lugar para la improvisación ni la imaginación; a sus ojos solo el materialismo y una adicción al trabajo masoquista merecen su respeto.

The Alba Angela sails along the middle of the Strait of Sicily. Salvuccio, the captain, orders the crew to switch off the lights and to cut the engine, as a police patrol will soon be nearby, on the lookout for further landings of illegal immigrants. The crew brings up the nets and silently waits in the dark. In the port of Catania, Ahmed imagines ways of leaving the abandoned boat in which he has been living for five years. At nightfall, he watches a cargo ship unloading goods which are free to circulate throughout Europe. At daybreak, the Alba Angela reaches the port of Catania and berths alongside Ahmed. In this Sicilian town, the illegally fishing trawler, its crew, and the illegal migrant both struggle with poverty, living side by side, in complete ignorance of one another.

Thirty female prisoners share the convicts’ ward of Tuilière Prison at Lonay. More than half of them have one or more children being raised elsewhere: with a sister, in a foster family, or – further away still – in their countries of origin. In portraying some of these women, the film sheds light on these mothers and the bond that ties them to their children.

Alex, a professional tourist guide, is asked to welcome Sacha,a young woman of Russian extraction. She has participated in a contest and, consequently, won a one-week stay in Geneva. From the outset, the young woman shakes up Alex's plans and drags him along with her through a risky and hazardous treasure-hunt at the confines of Eastern Switzerland. Wanted by the police and hunted down by the mafia, Alex and Sacha decide to shake off their pursuers by moving about more slowly than the others: they then advance through lakes and other roundabout ways. While Alex and Sacha sink deeply into an ever stranger Switzerland, they will observe, discover, oppose and finally love each other to the vanishing point.