Fenêtres sur le Japon gathers two rarely seen Japanese films in a programme that privileges attentive viewing and critical exchange. The screenings foreground intimate storytelling and formal rigour, tracing themes of memory, return and the resonant presence of voice. Each projection is followed by a discussion with specialists, situating the works within cinematic history and contemporary scholarship and inviting a reflective encounter with images, sound and cultural memory.
Founded in Geneva in 1951 by cinema enthusiasts including Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta, the Ciné-club universitaire de Genève (CCU) has spent 75 years bringing audiences together around singular films and shared discoveries.
To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the CCU looks back across more than seven decades of cinema with a programme of 30 films spanning continents, genres, generations and perspectives — while looking towards the future of the seventh art.
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)
Director Jean-Baptiste Héritier’s intimate documentary follows chef Gilles Varone on an extraordinary journey from London to the opening of his restaurant and the distinctions that followed. Moving between wild-herb gathering in the mountains and the feverish rhythm of service, the film brings viewers close to the daily craft behind his career. Its attentive, immersive portrait explores ambition, dedication and the relationship between a chef and his landscape.
The screening will be followed by a discussion featuring the chef and protagonist, Gilles Varone, as well as the director, Jean-Baptiste Héritier.
Legal age: 8. Suggested age: 12.
In French.
Lauren Dällenbach’s luminous debut observes the quiet, intimate life of Nicole and her mother Alberte, who have shared the same home for over fifty years. Filmed with subtle, patient camera work by Nicole’s niece, Lauren, the documentary traces a delicate path toward autonomy and connection. Tender, unsentimental and visually attentive, it explores family dependency, small acts of care and the gentle, hard-won emergence of a woman learning to shape her own life.
Special screening with the movie team and director Lauren Dällenbach.
Ridley Scott’s landmark science-fiction thriller follows the crew of the commercial vessel Nostromo as they respond to a distress call on a deserted planet. When one of them is assaulted by an unknown lifeform, the ship becomes the setting for a claustrophobic, escalating struggle for survival. Combining stark industrial design, tense atmospherics and H.R. Giger’s unforgettable creature imagery, Alien reshaped space horror and continues to influence filmmakers with its relentless sense of dread and formal precision.
In conjunction with the show Toutes les femmes sont des aliens (Oct. 8 – Nov. 14, 2026) and in the presence of Eric Devanthéry, director of Scènes du Grüti and stage director!
In English with French subtitles.
Vincent Chabloz’s first feature is a lyrical wildlife documentary that revisits Derborence through the intimate gaze of its animals. Observing encounters between fauna and occasional human visitors, the film blends tenderness and gentle humour to reveal the valley’s rhythms and fragile balances. Rich in observational detail and poetic imagery, Chabloz’s approach invites quiet wonder while underscoring the urgent need to protect the living world to which we belong.
In French with English subtitles.
In the presence of director Vincent Chabloz.
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