Thomas Imbach

Day Is Done

Thomas Imbach

A poetic but also wryly humorous study of the selfish artist trying to play the indifferent God, but ending up revealing himself as all too human.

Nemesis

Thomas Imbach

Milan Peschel

The film explores the destruction of a unique train station in Zurich and the construction of the new prison and police centre in its place. From the perspective of the filmmaker’s window, and with testimony from prisoners awaiting deportation, the film probes how we deal with the extinction of history and its replacement with total security.

Well Done

Thomas Imbach

The world we have just entered resembles a futurist machine. It is a colossus of concrete and glass, with a heart deep inside, a computer heart pulsating with an endless stream of data, while hundreds of beings in its labyrinthine veins are busy or trying to keep the coursing data under control… MUBI

Ghetto

Thomas Imbach

We accompany a handful of teenagers on their forays into department stores, listen to techno musik, stand on the sidelines as a big kid picks on someone half his size. But the film has nothing of the usual voyeuristic sensationalism à la reality TV; it is rather a patently constructed, analytical montage of reality that opens out into times and spaces, and provides food for thought. Ghetto is divided into six loosely interwoven chapters. Each of the six chapters has its own coloring, its own pace and actors, its own treatment of the raw material. And each has its own distinctive scenery – interspersed shots of the geographical or architectural environment in which the young protagonists live. –First Hand Films

Lenz

Thomas Imbach

Milan Peschel, Barbara Terpoorten

The filmmaker Lenz has left his native Berlin for the Vosges to research the story behind Georg Büchner's novel fragment Lenz. But he soon trades the Alsatian landscape for higher altitudes and more emotional territory: a reunion with his estranged wife Natalie and their son Noah in the Swiss Alps. Like his literary counterpart, the modern-day Lenz follows the Romantic motto: Genius writes its own rules. Against a background of kitsch global tourism - provided by the authentic Zermatt locations - Thomas Imbach's Lenz portrays an unconventional family and a man struggling between euphoria and desperation.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun

Thomas Imbach

Linda Olsansky, Herbert Fritsch

Petra Kelly, the 1980s 'green queen' and peace activist, is shot in her sleep by her lover and political ally, former West German army general Gert Bastian. He kills himself shortly afterwards. Was it murder, or did she want that shot? What happens to Petra, from the time Gert's bullet enters her skull to the moment it lodges in her brain and she dies? She experiences a flash-forward to the present time and wakes up in the glassy transit zone of an international airport. On her trip through this modern purgatory, Petra struggles to unravel the meaning of the shot together with Gert and other figures from her life. In the explosive moment between life and death, she recognizes the force of her most absolute desires.

Mary, Queen of Scots

Thomas Imbach

Camille Rutherford, Sean Biggerstaff

The life and death of the Scottish monarch.

Glaubenberg

Thomas Imbach

Zsofia Körös, Francis Benjamin Meier

Lena is in love with her brother Noah. In the desperate attempt to conquer her feelings, she retreats into a world of her own.

I Was a Swiss Banker

Thomas Imbach

Beat Marti, Laura Drasbæk

Roger is a young, dashing banker full of boyish self-confidence. He has a highly successful business, smuggling black money across the border for reinvestment. But then a split second reaction changes his entire life. Flagged down one day by a customs officers, Roger loses his cool and makes a run for it. His only means of escape: diving headlong into Lake Constance, thereby catapulting himself out of his life as a banker and into a totally new universe, populated with shy mermaids decked out in Lara Croft gear, and cunning magpie witches in helicopters. As in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, Roger has to pass three tests to cast off the witch’s curse and find happiness. His underwater journey through an intoxicatingly beautiful Switzerland is enhanced by the enchanting songs of sirens – a fable full of lust for life and love.