Projects

 

Journey to the End of the Night

Frank Matter, doc., CH 2026

In most cultures, night represents the origin of the world, the sinister, the uncontrollable, the irrational, and the passionate. Even the word «Enlightenment» makes it clear that only those who illuminate the darkness can attain knowledge and reason.

«Journey to the End of the Night» follows a wide variety of people through an imaginary night. Some of them we encounter several times during the night, while others appear only briefly and then burn out like shooting stars in the night sky. Sometimes the camera loses its narrative focus and drifts lost through an urban landscape. As darkness blurs the clear logic of the day, even time loses its sharp contours.

The film combines documentary, essayistic and fictional elements. The rhythms, the play of light, movement and energy are just as important to the narrative as words and thoughts. The film is a meditation on human existence between reason and irrationality, control and escape, longing and disappointment, a sometimes ecstatic, sometimes melancholic homage to modern life on the threshold of the age of artificial intelligence.

Writer, director: Frank Matter
Production: RecycledTV AG, Bern and soap factory GmbH, Basel

 

From Punk into the Future

Steff Bossert, doc., CH 2026

Reverend Beat-Man, underground musician, cult figure and citizen terror, is a living legend. For almost 40 years, the Reverend has been on the road at festivals, in rock clubs and dimly lit cellars, even far beyond Switzerland’s borders. Since the early 1990s, he has also run the record label Voodoo Rhythm Records – a unique piece of Swiss music and social history. «Records to ruin every party» is the quirky motto.

In 2014, a young boy attends a Beat Man concert with his father. The loud, punky music and the eccentric stage performance frighten the boy – but the concert is also a formative experience for him. Fast forward to the present: Milan, the boy from back then, has become a young man who wants to become a musician himself. He plucks up his courage, goes to Beat-Man’s record store and asks the reverend if he can play with him. After some initial hesitation, Beat-Man agrees to play with Milan – and soon they are on tour together, the old fighter and the young man who is still searching for himself. Beat-Man also agrees to Milan joining Voodoo Rhythm in order to contribute his ideas. What makes a young person turn to the edgy scene around Voodoo Rhythm in a time of slick and short-winded Spotify and Insta click culture trimmed for success and self-optimization? But Milan is curious and wants to try out even more. While starting out with Voodoo Rhythm, he works on subtle pop songs with the young Finja Keogh and goes on tour with the much more commercially oriented Birdman Jäggi.

«From Punk into the Future» uses touching, cross-generational encounters to tell the story of major changes in the cultural scene and the struggle to find one’s own artistic position in a confusing time. By juxtaposing Beat-Man’s story and the legacy of the Bernese youth movement of the 1980s with the doubts and conflicts of very young musicians, the film gets to the bottom of the question of what fades from cultural and political movements and what lives on in the work of later generations.

Writer, director: Steff Bossert
Production: soap factory, Basel

 

Everything will be fine

Everything will be fine – this slogan once adorned the Wohlgroth cultural factory in Zurich (1991–1993), a place of self-organised culture – and the largest squat in Switzerland. A place that stood not only for art and events, but also for a radical social experiment: alternative ways of life outside normative structures were not only conceived here, but lived.

Three decades later, filmmaker, artist and musician Jackie Brutsche brings this place back from obscurity. What was it that made up this ‘Wohlgroth feeling’ – which gave her life a new direction and shaped her artistic vision? And why does what Wohlgroth stood for seem more distant than ever today – and at the same time more urgent? After a period of lostness as a 15-year-old, this place was a decisive turning point: a space of lived creativity, community and self-empowerment – where there was room for pain, exchange was possible and new strength could grow. Today she asks: What creates identity and orientation? Does connection arise in a place, in an idea – or in shared experience?

The film combines personal memories with archive material and interviews with former squatters, artists and activists. A surreal artistic dimension complements the documentary material: in a futuristic city, young outsider Jackita discovers a wild underground cultural oasis – a community that lives, thinks and dreams differently. But eviction is imminent…

Writer, director: Jackie Brutsche
Production: soap factory GmbH