Drii Winter

In a small village deep in the mountains of the German-speaking canton of Uri in Switzerland, single mother Anna (beautifully played by Michèle Brand) is a postal worker by day and a barmaid by night. She develops a relationship with Marco (Simon Wisler), a lowland outsider who works as a farmhand in the village. Marco usually doesn't say much, but he is a hard worker and a gentle giant. The locals warn him that he better take good care of Anna and her daughter, Julia, otherwise he will have to deal with the villagers. Before long, they're married, but things take a turn for the tragic when Marco develops a brain tumour. Although surgery postpones the inevitable for a while, his personality begins to change, first only verbally and then in a way that endangers others. Anna is forced to make difficult decisions about his care… A moving film about guilt, penance and forgiveness, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the Berlinale earlier this year.

‘Stunning image-making fills out the stark storytelling in Swiss director Michael Koch's potent, stoically moving second feature… All the while, this shattering, unstable human drama is sturdily anchored by the humbling vastness and eternally fixed cycles of the land itself — captured by DP Armin Dierolf with a muscular pictorial sense that never settles for the merely picturesque.’—Guy Lodge, Variety