Switzerland | 2021 | 65 min
Language : French
A few months after the passing of Yves Yersin, an essential figure of Swiss cinema, the Festival proposes a (re)discovery of two of his films in order to pay him tribute. An ethnographical documentary film, Le Panier à viande, co-directed with Jacqueline Veuve, reports on a “bouchoyage” the slaughter of a pig on a farm by a travelling butcher. With great cinematographical modernity, it manages with sensitivity and accuracy to show a lost tradition, and with it, precious and forgotten gestures and moments. The second film, Angèle, one of the segments of Quatre d'entre elles, paints the portrait of an elderly woman considering the retirement home to be like the antechamber of death. It was in 1966 that Yves Yersin, Francis Reusser, Claude Champion and Jacques Sandoz, young Romand filmmakers, came together to produce a feature film composed of separately directed segments, by pooling funding and equipment. Interweaving fiction and documentary, they recount the destinies of women aged 16, 22, 31 and 72 while the society of the time is sketched out in the background.
The screening is accompanied by the launch of the publication Gestes d'artisans by Pierrine Saini and Thomas Schärer.