Valeria Stucki
Switzerland | 2023 | 66 min
World premiere
Language : Swiss German
Subtitles : French, English
When Lenin and Trotsky met in Zimmerwald, it was not to watch birds, contrary to what they claimed. The conference was a call to the workers of the world to unite against the war that was raging in Europe. This page of Switzerland’s history has long been forgotten, but new generations, such as the ones portrayed in this film, are willing to recover it.
In 1915, a strange group of ornithologists met in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald. Among them were Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky, both of which would shortly thereafter lead the revolution that would definitively shape the course of the 20th century. Of course, they were not there to watch birds: their goal was to rally the socialists of the world in a movement for peace and against the war that was tearing Europe apart. But unfortunately, nothing went as expected. That war escalated into a terrifyingly larger one two decades later, during which Switzerland - amazingly - managed to remain neutral. But Soviet children held onto that memory over the years, and they addressed innumerable letters every year to the municipality, requesting photographs and information about their heroes and the conference that had sparked the great revolution. More than a century later, a group of young students recover the memory that their elders tried to hide - not wanting to blemish the historical Swiss neutrality - thus enabling the village of Zimmerwald to reconnect with a very important moment of its history.
Violeta Bava
La Forestera, 2021
