Sigfrit Steiner

Prosecutor Etzel discovers that his father has sentenced a man, Leonardo Maurizius, on mere presumptions. He then makes it a point of honor to trace the sources of the case to uncover the truth.

General George S. Patton died in a car accident in 1945. But was his death actually a murder. Is he targeted by Nazis angered by Germany's defeat? Or by Russians who knew that Patton had argued in favor of invading the Soviet Union towards the end of the war? Or is it because Patton is investigating the theft of a quarter of a billion dollars of Nazi gold? Or is it because his subordinate Colonels - the flamboyantly gay Colonel and his worried lover are fearful that he is getting too close to discovering the truth.

The search for a child murderer drags a once-respected detective into an all-consuming obsession.

A remarkable approach to Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther": on the one hand, a film adaptation that strives to remain faithful to the work and its words; on the other hand, an examination of Goethe's authentic story, his experiences that inspired his writing, and his retrospective comments as an old man. The dialectical connection between these two models brings to life experiences of love, loneliness, and deadly despair, leading in one case to desperate suicide and in the other to poetic processing.

The Zurich social welfare office sends a young worker to look after a 75 year old man thinking about suicide: His wife is suddenly paralyzed and his dwelling and work place change hands, forcing him to deal with relocating as well.

At the end of the Second World War, orphans of various nationalities come together at the Pestalozzi Children's Village in Trogen. When the order arrives from Poland that the Polish children must return to their country, it comes as a shock to 13-year-old Andrzey: he doesn't want to leave Anja, for whom he has developed a strong affection. The two children decide to flee and go into hiding...

When Stephanie, a famous violinist, contracts multiple sclerosis her life begins to fall apart. Her career ends, her husband leaves her for another woman and her favorite pupil leave the country. Unable to bear all this loss, Stephanie attempts suicide.

Persona Non Grata in his homeland, protest singer Klaus Drittemann must leave East Berlin, his wife and child and emigrate to the West, where representatives of an American record company are eagerly awaiting him. They plan to exploit his defection from communism both ideologically and financially. But Klaus, as ill-at-ease in the West as in the East, is reluctant to be an expendable commodity. Leaving his contract unsigned (or signed in his manner), he departs for Cambridge to meet his father, a concert player, who left East Berlin when Klaus was young. He is accompanied by a young French journalist, Emma, who claims to have knowledge of where his father has been living since he disappeared for more than a decade.

A fur hunter living as a hermit in the Alaskan mountains is mistakenly suspected of the murder of a gold prospector. The murdered man's sister hires a gunslinger to catch the hunter, but after a dramatic confrontation, the two men become friends. Adventure movie based on Jack London's novel "Son of the Wolf".

Berner police sergeant Studer celebrates his daughter's wedding at the inn of an old friend. When a murder occurs outside the restaurant late at night, he takes charge of the investigation. Strong debut performance by Hans Heinz Moser in the role of Glauser's brooding investigator Studer.

A man in his fifties returns from America to his native village. Everyone knows that in the New World he served a lengthy prison sentence for manslaughter. He retreats to an isolated quarry in the woods he inherited. There he lives like a hermit, gruffly disencouraging anyone to come near the place.

The 23-year-old Bruno accidentally clashes with society, the judicial and the police. Once he has exceeded the legal limits, he is stuck to the wrong side of the law.

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.

Escaping a Nazi prison train in war-torn Italy, an American and a British soldier set out for the Swiss border and find themselves leading a multi-national party of refugees for the Italian underground.

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The life and struggles of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist.

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A hairdresser is being recruited during World War I by the Swiss military where they turn this soft civilian into a 'real man'.

Cedric "Ceddie" Errol lives with his mother in poor circumstances in New York. The bright child is popular everywhere he goes. The boy's best friends are the shopkeeper Mr. Hobbs and the shoeshine boy Dick. One day, Ceddie receives the news that he is to move in with his grandfather in faraway England. The old Earl of Dorincourt, the father of Ceddie's deceased father, needs an heir and wants to take the boy to his castle. Ceddie is to grow up there as Lord Fauntleroy - but without his mother, as the earl has never got over the fact that his son married an American woman. Despite this downer, Ceddie arrives in England full of anticipation and performs a minor miracle. In no time at all, the little lord manages to turn the bitter old man into a philanthropist and lovable grandfather.

Norbert Lang inherits a hotel and has to deal with a multitude of problems at the end of the year. There's the pushy singer who wants to get closer to him than he'd like. The staff quickly takes off after arguments. When the heating starts acting up, he has to hire a repairman. But the repairman shows up with unexpected backup and causes even more chaos.

Tells of the tribulations of a middle-aged official of the Austro-Hungarian Bureau of Weights and Measures in fighting the local shopkeepers and traders whose weights are frequently light.

A tramp tries to trick the community into paying for the funeral of his fellow tramp who was found frozen to death.

A recording of the 1939 play "Mother Courage and Her Children" for German TV.

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Third Jerry Cotton Adaption. A big shipment of Nitroglycerine, enough to make a shambles of New York, mysteriously vanishes! It's a race between agent Jerry Cotton and the underworld to see who can find the deadly explosive first. To complicate things further, the nitro must be found before a torrid heat wave causes it to blow much of the city sky high.

The daughter of a traveling circus director falls in love with a young farmer and finds herself in a life-changing conflict.

When a German businessman causes a car accident with deadly consequences, the papers start digging into his past to find scandals. What they find causes him to reevaluate his own past during WW2 when he was in Greece.

Richard Mertens, a successful magazine editor with a cold, empty marriage to Lucy, seeks excitement through an affair with younger colleague Eva. Yet his need for status traps him in superficiality, undermining genuine connection. A legal battle with old friend Ferrow, won through perjury, reveals Mertens’s moral emptiness, shattering his relationship with Eva. Alone, he finds solace only in listening to bartender Brigitte.

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Francois Korb is an arms manufacturer who sold both to the Germans and the Allied forces. Korb's home life is less than ideal, since his wife is having an affair with his brother, and his young son is inseparable from a teddy bear. To remedy the son's situation, the parents take in a little refugee girl as a temporary companion and playmate, and the two children become fast friends.

Matthias is the illegitimate son of a factory worker. He lives as an indentured child labourer at his dictatorial aunt’s remote guesthouse. The only thing he knows in life are hard work and hard punches. After a sudden death, the unhappy boy finds the opportunity to make his way to his mother. In collaboration with SRF, Cinémathèque suisse, Memoriav and Praesens Film, ZFF once again presents a freshly restored version of a Swiss cinema classic. This 1941 literary adaptation is an almost forgotten jewel of Swiss film history that offers an impressive insight into Eastern Switzerland’s embroidery industry. Born in 1930, a later chapter of the main actor Röbi Rapp’s life was portrayed in the multi-award winning docufiction DER KREIS.

1802: The adventurous life story of Hans Bückler, known as “Schinderhannes”, who fights against the French occupying forces and large landowners who exploit poor farmers in the Hunsrück region during the Napoleonic Wars.

Three bums get played by the devil.

Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi once more explores the dilemma of intellectualism at the expense of humanity in 1982's Imperative. The story concerns math professor Robert Powell, who feels that there is something lacking in his ever-so-precise life. What is missing is truth, specifically philosophical truth. Thus he philosophizes at great length, allowing director Zanussi plenty of room for didactic but little room for warmth. Leading ladies Brigette Fossey and Leslie Caron occasionally melt through the cold logic of Imperative.

Great excitement in the Principality of Allegretto. Professor Sound, owner of a sanatorium for musical instruments, has come up with a sensational invention: the music pill. Once swallowed, it transforms the worst sourpuss into a cheerful singing and dancing contemporary. The success is astounding, as is the response in the international media. The pill produces satisfied tax officials, happy drivers, cheerful police officers and smiling burglars. Tourism flourishes, as a trip to Allegretto soon becomes more popular than a vacation in Hawaii. But dark clouds gather over the dwarf state when Field Marshal Heinz mobilizes his troops in neighbouring Moderato.

The old and sick detective superintendent Bärlach has to investigate the murder of his colleague Ulrich Schmied, who was murdered in the middle of the country road.

Three couples want to spend a short break together. Some have a traffic accident, the others are prevented professionally. So the designer Robert and the youth helper Ellen are forced to spend the days in a remote farmhouse alone with her young son. The previously suppressed marriage crisis breaks open. Allegations, confessions, charges, self-accusations are in the room. Painfully, they come to the realization that only their own happiness is responsible for their happiness. With the old landlord, each of them finds himself. In the end, Robert and Ellen want to try a new beginning.

In this Swiss film noir a private investigator stumbles onto a case involving blackmail and an oversexed, under-aged girl. He finds the girl, and, tragically, becomes involved with her.

The paths of guests and employees cross at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz: A chambermaid experiences financial difficulties. A guest has been robbed. A thief is caught. An assistant cook is promoted to waiter. And there’s no shortage of love in this small world of the great Hotel Palace. Keeping an orderly eye over proceedings is the hotel’s beautiful patron, whose heart is in the right place.

Oscar Bänz is a solid, middle-class taxi driver and widower. He loves his daughter Irma with all his heart. In order to provide for her, he has not remarried. Irma, a quiet, intelligent young woman, is studying medicine. To finance her education, Bänz rents a room to Toni Schellenberg, a young man from the countryside with a promising future as a soccer player. But the big city, easy money, and superficial friends cause Toni to neglect his training and evening classes, and eventually his employer fires him. Irma, who has fallen in love with the handsome athlete, asks her father for help. He is finally able to find Toni a job as a taxi driver. But when Irma attends a student party and also agrees to a date with the senior physician Dr. Zbinden, Toni feels neglected.

A small farmer's struggle for survival against the odds.

If any one man is responsible for the rejuvenation of the postwar Swiss film industry, that man was director Leopold Lindtberg. Matto Regiert (Madness Rules) was co-adapted for the screen by Lindtberg from a novel by Friedrich Glauser. Heinrich Gretler stars as Police Constable Studer, the hero of several of Glauser's most popular works. This time, Studer must solve the murder of the director of an insane asylum -- and it's not (surprise, surprise) the most likely suspect, manic-depressive patient Herbert Caplaun. For box-office purposes, Matto Regiert stresses a romantic subplot involving Caplaun and nurse Irma Wasem.

In order to stop the annual flooding, a dam is to be built in the mountain valley; a life-threatening undertaking for the inhabitants.

Based on the story by Jeremas Gotthelf, this horror film direct by Mark M. Rissi features the hallucinations of a woman after a drug raid gone.

Realist melodrama set in Zurich. In the old town district, people are concerned about Mäni, the child of a toilet attendant, who is growing up without a father. Postman Jucker appeals to the boy's conscience and protects him from unjustified accusations. After Mäni's mother dies, Jucker, who has become the child's guardian, takes Mäni into his home. Mrs. Jucker does not accept the boy and accuses Jucker of forgetting their own deceased child. Mrs. Jucker flees to her sister's house. Mäni also runs away.

A policeman is not convinced that the prime suspect in a murder case is realty guilty and so decides to reinvestigate the case, despite the lack of co-operation from locals.