Yurlu | Country

Atom Egoyan’s Ararat frames the legacy of the 1915 Armenian genocide through a mosaic of interconnected lives. Layering an artist painting his mother, a director staging his definitive film, a young man at customs, a daughter seeking her missing father, a lecturer and an actor confronting role and responsibility, the film probes memory, exile and the struggle to reconstruct a contested past. Sparse, textured imagery and careful rhythms create a reflective, often unsettling atmosphere that examines how history is performed, remembered and inherited.

English with French subtitles – Followed by a talk with Arsinée Khanjian (actress and producer) and Valentina Calzolari Bouvier (professor of Armenian studies at the University of Geneva).

Ernst Zürcher and Jean-Pierre Duval’s lyrical documentary blends scientific inquiry and poetic imagery to explore an ancient, venerated forest. Drawing on forest science and filmic observation, it examines the idea of a forest’s “collective intelligence” and follows encounters with a deer both visible and invisible — a figure that ties myth, art (echoes of Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke) and ecology. Quiet, textured cinematography and contemplative rhythms foreground biodiversity, climate regulation and our lost harmony with the land, balancing empirical insight with a meditative emotional core.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with:
– Ernst Zürcher – forestry engineer (ETH Zurich, EPFL, HES Bern, UNIL), author of *Trees, Between Visible and Invisible* and director of the film
– Jean-Pierre Duval – photographer and filmmaker
– Sophie Swaton – founder of the Zoein Foundation, philosopher and economist, lecturer-researcher at UNIL and contributor to the film.

In French.

Helena Dali’s documentary reconstructs the life of Swiss entrepreneur Cäsar Dubler and the textile empire he built in Catalonia. Seen through the eyes of his grandchildren, the film interweaves family albums, Swiss archives and Catalan landscapes in an intimate, archival-driven study of industry, exile and memory. It traces the rise and decline of a family business against twentieth-century social and political upheavals, favouring textured images and contemplative rhythms to evoke the traces and silences that shape personal and collective history.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with director Helena Dali and Sébastien Farré, director of the Maison de l’histoire and co-director of the Festival Histoire et Cité.

Original version in Swiss German, German and Spanish with French subtitles