Housed within the Maison des Arts du Grütli, Les Cinémas du Grütli is distinguished for its commitment to showcasing independent, international, and avant-garde films. Featuring multiple screening rooms, the cinema caters to cinephiles with a diverse daily selection of cinematic expressions, incorporating retrospectives, thematic cycles, and a thoughtful program tailored for a young audience. Notably, the cinema engages in collaborations with various cultural festivals and hosts premieres in the presence of film directors.
Cinéopéras gathers four film evenings curated by artists from the season, each screening chosen in dialogue with the selector’s artistic universe. Curators Kyle Abraham, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Marie-Ève Signeyrole and Philippe Jaroussky present works that trace convergences between music, theatre, choreography and cinematic form. The programme favors striking visual textures, intimate soundscapes and performances that blur stage and screen, inviting a reflective, sensory encounter with film as a living, interpretive art.
Věra Chytilová’s two-screening offers a glimpse into a pioneering voice of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Her films juxtapose sharp social observation with inventive, often playful formal experiments, disrupting narrative expectations. Through striking images and rhythms, they probe gender, power and the absurdities of everyday life, balancing dark humour with moral urgency. The program highlights Chytilová’s singular visual energy and critical gaze, inviting reflection on cinema’s capacity to question society and form.
Screening will be followed by a discussion with director Stéphanie Barbey.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s hypnotic drama follows Vicky in early-2000s Taipei as she recalls a youth defined by nightclub nights, an unstable love affair and a pervasive sense of uncertainty about the future. With languid long takes and images bathed in light, the film transforms an intimate narrative into a meditation on memory, the passage of time and the struggle to find one’s place amid societal change. Sensory and elegiac, it privileges mood over plot.
Mandarin with French subtitles. Screening in collaboration with the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF)
Alice Rohrwacher’s luminous drama follows Lazzaro, a kind young man living in an isolated rural community dominated by an exploitative landowning family. A chance encounter with a young aristocrat upends his world and sets in motion a poetic reflection on innocence, collective memory and social change. Blending social realism with fable and mythic undertones, the film examines modern forms of exploitation and the transformations of Italian rural life through intimate performances and a haunting, lyrical visual style.
In Italian with French subtitles.
Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs follows a father and his two children living in acute precarity in Taipei. Through long, contemplative takes and a heightened sensory palette, the film observes solitude, urban marginality and fragile human bonds as the family encounters a mysterious woman. Radical and immersive, the director’s slow cinema registers bodies and cityscapes with rigorous empathy, turning duration into emotional weight and inviting a bodily experience of alienation and connection.
Mandarin with French subtitles. Screening as part of the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF)
Orkhan Aghazadeh’s tender documentary follows an elderly projectionist in an isolated Azerbaijani village as he strives to revive the local cinema after years without a screening room. Observational and intimate in approach, the film captures quiet gestures, communal rituals and the projectionist’s relationship to memory, passion and intergenerational transmission. Through patient framing and subtle soundscapes, it becomes a reflection on cultural persistence, the fate of traditional film spaces and the communal power of shared images.
Talysh and Russian with French subtitles. Screening in collaboration with Let’s Doc! (National Documentary Month). Screening followed by a discussion.
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Culture, curated weekly.
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