“Drii Winter” at the Berlinale – Does this Swiss film gem enchant Berlin? – Culture

“Drii Winter” is one of two Swiss films in competition at the Berlinale. Michael Koch from Basel wrote this calm yet dramatic love story in the Uri Prealps and filmed it with amateur actors.

“Drii Winter” is one of those films in the Berlinale Competition that stick. The quiet Swiss mountain drama shows how magical cinema can be. Without big words, without loud drama and without actors.

Filmed only with amateurs

Director Michael Koch worked exclusively with amateurs. If you google the two main actors Michèle Brand and Simon Wisler, you will find an architect from Uri and a mountain farmer from Parpan. He looks like a king of wrestling, beefy and powerful.

He plays Marco, a lowlander from Willisau who works for the mountain farmer Alois on the Isenthal Alps above Lake Uri. He is with Anna, who works in the valley as a postwoman and in her mother’s inn. She has one child from a previous relationship: Julia.

A big, fragile love

At the regulars’ table, people are talking about the “newcomer” from the lowlands: will it hold up with Anna? He can grab it, Marco, even if he only drinks iced tea instead of beer.

Marco speaks little. But the love between the two can be felt in every picture, in every scene. It is a fine, quiet, but great love, which soon also includes little Julia. Anna marries Marco, for Julia he becomes “daddy”.

But then Marco gets weird. Sits motionless at the table when he’s supposed to be working, complains of a headache, forgets a cow in the snow. A brain tumor is the doctor’s devastating diagnosis.

The tumor is in the impulse center, Marco’s personality will change. And Marco changes in such a way that not only the small family, but the entire village structure suddenly becomes fragile and fragile.

As is the landscape, so are the people

Michael Koch tells the highly dramatic story in quiet, slow images – the German cameraman Armin Dierolf captures the Uri high valley and its Alps with an almost documentary view.

The people with their stories are inconceivable without the rough, steep and yet beautiful landscape. She doesn’t believe in God, says little Julia to Marco once. You believe in the mountains, the trees, the animals, the stones and the snow.

Legend:

Rough and beautiful: the people in “Drii Winter” are shaped by the landscape.

Armin Dierolf / hugo film

Dramatic surprises

Again and again Michael Koch breaks the almost documentary story. A uniformed choir stands in the landscape, commenting on the events as in a Greek tragedy and dividing the drama into five acts.

Once an Indian film team shoots a singing and dancing scene in the snow. These interruptions in the narrative flow are bizarre, yet coherent. They make this film a work of art.

Legend:

The chorus breaks the almost documentary perspective of the film.

Armin Dierolf / hugo film

This film gem was shot in a narrow, almost square format – that too is an unusual view in cinemas today.

With the drama “Drii Winter”, Michael Koch creates what few films at this year’s Berlinale succeed: an atmosphere that carries the entire two-hour film and enchants the audience.

He is a pearl in this year’s Berlinale program. Or more appropriately: a very valuable rough diamond.