LUX

For their self-produced first feature, young directors Mateo Ybarra and Raphaël Dubach dreamed up a formally inventive documentary about a colossal Swiss military exercise held in 2019. Halted early in the editing stage, LUX promises to be as caustic as it is poetic, a deadpan comedy of Swiss reality.

– Nicholas Elliott, Selection Committee

Raphaël and Mateo's Journey in the Festival's History

"I feel as though I’m wrapped in cotton wool. With no real anxieties. With no hope. Locked up in comfort and safety.” Charles Dé is the head of an important, austere family business. On the day of the company’s 100th anniversary, he realizes his bourgeois, capitalistic lifestyle is the polar opposite of his erstwhile passions. In the midst of an existential thunderstorm, he decides to break completely with this universe and live on the edge. He then encounters Paul and Adeline, a bohemian couple with whom he shares a free-spirited existence in the Geneva countryside. Tanner’s film has the energy and strength, but also the fragility of a debut film. Renato Berta’s cinematography is raw; François Simon’s performance is jarring. Most of all, though, Charles, Dead or Alive is a cinematic manifesto, with the energy of May ’68, where one dreams of Lake Geneva becoming a harbor as dark as coal, with black barges, where a car is launched from the heights of a gravel quarry; where one expresses their malcontent by spitting potatoes; where Swiss prosperity is criticized in a school poem. In paving the way for new Swiss cinema with sensitivity and irony, Alain Tanner described the sparkling energy of a time period where everything had to be deconstructed. Therein certainly lies the affection we have for this film and for Tanner’s work: poetry as an act of subversion.

– Mateo Ybarra and Raphaël Dubach