Daniel Schmid

Beautiful, detached, laconic, consumptive Lily Brest is a streetwalker with few clients. She loves her idle boyfriend Raoul who gambles away what little she earns. The town's power broker, called the rich Jew, discovers she is a good listener, so she's soon busy. Raoul imagines grotesque sex scenes between Lily and the Jew; he leaves her for a man. Her parents, a bitter Fascist who is a cabaret singer in drag and her wheelchair-bound mother, offer no refuge... (imdb)

In the late 19th century, composer Verdi established a home for retired opera singers and musicians in Italy. This is a portrait of everyday life in that home.

This heady exercise in excess mixes the operatic passion of La Traviata, stylish decadence of Stroheim and Sternberg, and the macabre glee of Grand Guignol. Ingrid Caven plays Dietrich-like chanteuse stricken with CamilIe-like wasting disease. The disease seems to be arrested when a plump, wealthy young man (Peter Kern) develops a grand passion for her, but mortality raises its grinning skull again when she falls helplessly in love with another man.

A woman goes to Cannes and, lost in its chaos and unable to obtain tickets, ends up watching it on television from her hotel room. (Letterboxd)

The formerly great Swiss hotel which Valentin's family owned when he was a boy has been emptied and is about to be torn down. He revisits the magical site's empty halls and ballrooms. (imdb)

A young man raises the dead in a high valley where the power is held by Violanta. (imdb)

"Schmid's satire on 19th-century class relations is also a thinly veiled commentary on the failure of the 1968 political revolution. Once a year, an aristocratic Austrian family holds a traditional feast at which masters and servants trade places (the basic idea reminds Pirandello and a short story by Poe where the inmates of a asylum switch places with the doctors.) (KG)

A journalist is assigned to interview an eccentric anthropologist who has exhumed the skeleton of Jörg Jenatsch, a revered freedom fighter who was mysteriously murdered in 1639. (KG)

This is an attempt to offer insight into the Japanese Kabuki star Tamasaburo Bando, one of the last defenders of this ancient and disappearing performing tradition. (imdb)

North Africa in the 1930s. Julien, a young, bored diplomat meets Clothilde, whose husband is on a mission in Siberia. He becomes infatuated with her, and soon ends up spending all his time with her, longing to know everything about her. (imdb)

An innocent Russian call girl believes that she would make use of her influential contacts to get Swiss nationality. (imdb)