“Underground Swiss”, Switzerland differently

He presented three documentaries as a director and his association Climage produced several others proposed by the festival. Stéphane Goël, originally from Lausanne, talks about Switzerland in his films. ” Switzerland is a country of reason and not of love that can only hold because it invented the culture of compromise “. A tormented geography that isolates communities, a multiplicity of languages ​​and particularisms. ” Our national narrative is our landscape, these are our mountains “. How to tell this multiplicity? The selection made by the festival organizers is impressive, recognizes Stéphane Goël. We see everything that is presented, and it also makes us think of the films that could not be retained and ” we say to ourselves that we have done our job to tell this country, in its diversity, its cynicism, its violence “.

” My responsibility, as a filmmaker, is first of all to address the Swiss public “. Especially since ” raising awareness is more complicated in Switzerland than elsewhere », in particular because of this system of direct democracy by popular referendum.

Committed films

A process wonderfully explained in one of the documentaries he directed and presented at the festival, From the kitchen to Parliament, recounting the long march of women’s right to vote in Switzerland. The country became fully democratic in 1991, he said, a bit provocatively, during the first presentation, when the last canton – in German-speaking Switzerland – to deny women the right to vote, gave in. Built on a classic system from archive images, testimonials that are sometimes funny or scathing because of their discrepancy with our view today on the place of women in society, and insights from sociologists, political leaders and women’s associations, the film, the latest version of which dates from 2021, was a great television and then cinema success.

Another documentary by Stéphane Goël presented at the festival, State of necessity (2022), which recounts the trials and convictions in recent years of young activists defending the need to act for the climate by investing in emblematic places such as Credit Suisse, accused of financing fossil fuels or department stores to challenge public opinion. public on hyperconsumption. One can act against the law to defend a superior right, that of living in a healthy environment: this is the basis of the state of necessity. Trials that have had a strong echo in Switzerland where climate issues mobilize young people, as in many countries, to the point that a hundred lawyers have formed a network to defend this cause on a voluntary basis (Lawyers for the climate).

Swiss themes certainly but which echo in France and elsewhere in the world where both women’s rights and the defense of the climate are also very topical. ” Banks in Switzerland are 1% of people “recalls Stéphane Goël. The remaining 99% are all subjects and the variety of his filmography bears witness to this, embracing social issues, therefore, but also more intimate subjects such as Pieces of paradise in which he interviews people, including his father, about what death is to them. A moving moment of filial intimacy, he says.

To film is to manipulate the dream

” We may talk about the “objective camera”, filming is always a form of dispossession, of violence in the documentary “. His approach, and that of the collective, is to always question their legitimacy to film, ” who am I, what gives me the right to film you? “… Because ” filming is capturing a part of your dream that I’m going to cut out, that I’m going to manipulate and transform because I’m going to have to tell a story… it’s always exercising a form of violence, so knowing who I am to exercise this violence and what is my commitment to the person I am filming. Questions raised by many documentary filmmakers and which we had heard in a sequence of the documentary, Carole Roussopoulos, a woman with a camera, by Emmanuelle de Riedmatten, also presented at the festival. How far can this appropriation go and what does it also say about the filmmaker? So many ethical questions that the Climage collective has been thinking about since its creation.

Filming to remember

All these stories, these testimonies remember and contribute to the history of the communities in which they were filmed, so most of the films produced by Climage are available to the public. on the Swiss Romande Television website. French-speaking Swiss Television largely co-finances film production, explained Stéphane Goël during a round table devoted to production, and in Switzerland there are no format requirements or distribution priorities as in France.

Stéphane Goël is now the oldest member of this collective founded in 1985 in the wake of the advent of video and in the post-68 cultural effervescence of the squat movement, told in several films presented at the festival. Self-taught filmmakers in revolt against a cinema described as bourgeois and who refuse to enter into an excessively hierarchical system of production and distribution. In Lausanne, Geneva, Zürich, young people are calling for fewer banks and more culture, places to create and live, say AlternaSwitzerland Where Kalvingrad-A history of alternative culture in Geneva.

Stéphane Goël will also bow out. At some point, you have to leave room for there to be a generational renewal but also of profiles, less masculine, less white too, he slips. Continue the movement initiated with the production of films such as The ladies, by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Raymond (presented at the festival), recounting the daily life of sixty-somethings -those invisible in cinema and in life itself- who refuse to disappear from the public landscape. ” Stop looking for money, using public funds to commit to other projects », think about other proposals and forms of narration, but stop filming, that’s not it.