15h15 / SHORTS PROGRAMME 4 (84’) (Shorts Film Competition)

510 Meter über dem Meer | 510 Meters Above Sea Level, by Kerstin Polte (Switzerland, 2008, 16’)
Tanz ins Glück | Dancing to Happiness, by Barbara Seiler (Switzerland, 2008, 17’)
Duas Aranhas, by Carlos Conceição (Portugal, 2009, 9’)
Easy Tiger, by Alkmini Boura (Switzerland, 2008, 12’)
Tect | Test, by Borislav Rostov (Bulgaria, 2008, 8’)

A series of stories on women takes off in a mountain airport. In 510 Meters Above Sea Level a woman misses her flight and while waiting for a new connection, she meets a stranger… Dancing to Happiness draws together a stock broker and a cleaning lady through common interests, such as dance lessons. A story at dawn reveals two women, one of them about to give birth, in Duas Aranhas. At night, in Easy Tiger, a casual encounter in a copy shop in Zurich promises revelations mainly to a woman in her 30s who feels that her life hasn’t quite started yet. In Test we’re placed inside an elevator in a health clinic. Waiting for the results of her exams, a girl dreams of what life would be like, alongside another girl she just met by chance. N.G.

17h15

(Queer Art)
Chris & Don: A Love Story, by Guido Santi, Tina Mascara (USA, 2007, 90’)

Chris & Don: A Love Story is the true-life story of the passionate three-decade relationship between British writer Christopher Isherwood (whose Berlin Stories was the basis for all incarnations of the much-beloved Cabaret) and American portrait painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior. From Isherwood’s Kit-Kat-Club years in Weimar-era Germany (the inspiration for his most famous work) to the couple’s first meeting on the sun-kissed beaches of 1950s Malibu, their against-all-odds saga is brought to dazzling life by a treasure trove of multimedia. Bachardy’s contemporary reminiscences (in the Santa Monica home he shared with Isherwood until
his death in 1986) artfully interact with archival footage, rare home movies (with glimpses of glitterati pals W.H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky and Tennessee Williams), reenactments, and, most sweetly, whimsical animations based on the cat-and-horse cartoons the pair used in their personal correspondence. With Isherwood’s status as an out-andproud gay maverick, and Bachardy’s eventual artistic triumph away from the considerable shadow of his life partner, Chris & Don: A Love Story is above all a joyful celebration of a most extraordinary couple.

19h15

(Feature Film Panorama)
Finale, by Francois Coetzee (South Africa, 2008, 55’)

Albert’s life was irreversibly altered when the friendship that defined his childhood abruptly ended. In the wake of his best friend’s departure to university, he found himself isolated in their hometown where they had spent their youth together. His music and his distant father now his only companions. Out of the bleakness surfaces
feelings he has to confront for the first time. When the time finally comes for Albert to join his long time friend at university, he finds himself even more isolated than before. Now, in a profound attempt to regain his friend’s acceptance, he takes on the physically and emotionally demanding task of learning the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata. As he becomes engrossed in the Sonata, the past relives itself and the truth of Albert’s desperate search for reconciliation becomes clear to him, while his friend grows more distant. Finale follows a boy’s struggle to embrace his coming of age as he fears facing the person on the other side of the mirror.