Movies: Daniel Schmid

The story of a German singer named Willie, who while working in Switzerland, falls in love with a Jewish composer named Robert, whose family is helping people to flee from the Nazis. Robert’s family is skeptical of Willie, thinking she could be a Naz...

A former hero of the French anti-Nazi resistance is approached by old comrades to lead a financially struggling liberal newspaper. Initially reluctant, she takes on the challenge, mortgaging her house to keep it afloat. As conservative forces intensi...

A journalist is assigned to interview an eccentric anthropologist who has exhumed the skeleton of Jörg Jenatsch, a revered freedom fighter who was mysteriously murdered in 1639. Initially disinterested, the journalist begins to uncover unflattering ...

In Japanese theater, women's roles are traditionally played by men. The man playing the woman's role, the Onnagata, does not imitate the woman, as in the West, but tries to capture her significance. He need not stick close to his model, but draws far...

The formerly great Swiss hotel which Valentin’s family owned when he was a boy has been emptied and is about to be torn down. He revisits the magical site’s empty halls and ballrooms....

When Barbe-bleue loses his fifth wife, the turbulent Boulotte is selected at random to be the next one. But Barbe-Bleue falls in love with Hermia – who loves the shepherd Saphir – and soon wearies of Boulotte. So, he asks his alchemist to concoct for...

Experimental fiction film about young people taking on different creative tasks....

Roberte, 40, resistant during the war, Calvinist and anticlerical, is deputy to the chamber and inspector of Censorship. She married Octave, an old Catholic aesthete, professor of canon law, whom she saves from impeachment for collaboration during th...

A young man raises the dead in a high valley where the power is held by Violanta....

Tom Ripley, an American who deals in forged art, is slighted at an auction in Hamburg by picture framer Jonathan Zimmerman. When Ripley is asked by gangster Raoul Minot to kill a rival, he suggests Zimmerman, and the two, exploiting Zimmerman's termi...

Miss Giehse, an elderly teacher in a boarding school, tries with a lot of good will for her student Robert. The boy seems strangely withdrawn and depressed to her. Robert, whose behavior can be traced back to his parental home, which lacks orderly fa...

Kazuo Ohno, Father of the Butoh Dance, first appeared on stage at the age of 43. He left the stage only at the age of one hundred, three years before he died. This short, dialogue-less film presents the exceptional range of expressions that this Japa...

“Let us assume that Switzerland is truly a paradise. The music hereto was written long ago. We have merely forgotten it.” (Daniel Schmid) This is the material from which the most Swiss of all operas is made: the legendary Wilhelm Tell – a Swiss hero:...

Scenes from Berlin: Kids playing football, a man tries to light a fire in his stove, a film team sets up a shot in a park, students discuss politics....

Hans is a street fruit peddler and born loser. His choice of career upsets his bourgeois family, causing him to turn to drinking and violence. After recovering from a debilitating heart attack, his business finally begins to take off. However, the mo...

Beautiful, detached, laconic, consumptive Lily Brest is a streetwalker with few clients. She loves her idle boyfriend, Raoul, who gambles away what little she earns. The town's power broker, called the rich Jew, discovers she is a good listener, so s...

Daniel Schmid's actual first feature, made during his (later abandoned) studies at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), is an attempt at an unusual horror film: A little girl asks an older lady to buy her a cinema ticket. They discov...

A woman goes to Cannes and, lost in its chaos and unable to obtain tickets, ends up watching it on television from her hotel room....

Set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de W...

Satire on 19th-century class relations and thinly veiled commentary on the failure of the 1968 political revolution....