Hugues Ryffel

This documentary show the work, the worries and the joys of a family dedicated to viticulture, the Potterat, living in Lavaux. Three generations live together, keeping the old traditions

The shooting of this peasant chronicle in the Gruyère region of Switzerland lasted a whole year, from July 1989 to July 1990.

Julie is a young woman from Rose Hill who arrives in rural Switzerland to marry her older pen-friend Marcel. She feels unhappy until she meets Jean, a younger man. However, his father disagrees.

The Bapst Brothers: Romain, Maurice and Jacques – whom we will also meet in The Gruyere Chronicle (produced in 1990) – are peasants and carriers and work with their father. In autumn and winter, they bid for the community’s wood, cut down the pine trees and bring down the logs through the snowy woods by horse-drawn sleigh.

Although there are women in the lives of the three main protagonists -- a middle-aged architect, his construction designer, and a journalist -- the women are not as crucial to the men's search for an identity as the title might suggest. When the three men run into a former professor of the architect and designer, they are inspired by his fanfare and expansive nature. Still in search of solutions to their particular problems, the men head out to visit the professor and get to the bottom of their own issues. Unfortunately, the professor turns out to be more "loco" than otherwise, and the three men watch their hopes burst like a popped balloon -- it seems like their ability to assess human character should now be added to their list of problem spots.

A “filmic re-reading” of Max Frisch's novella Montauk (1974) and of excerpts from his published diaries. It is neither a biographical portrait of Frisch – who was one of the greatest 20th century Swiss writers – nor a filmed adaptation of the novel. Instead, Dindo returns to the locations the author describes in his texts, searching for traces of past events that may turn out to have been more imagined than real.