Thomas Imbach's Day Is Done, which screened in the Forum at this year's Berlinale in February and won the Zurich Film Award 2011 earlier this month, opens in Berlin on Thursday. The site's flaunting some pretty winning quotes, with Screen Daily noting that the documentary essay features "images of ravishing though unconventional urban beauty," while Der Tagesspiegel writes that an "evocative maelstrom of great power emerges in the course of nearly two hours."
But you won't have to be in Berlin to watch work by this independent Swiss filmmaker. For a full year, we'll be showing a selection of Films by Thomas Imbach.
Well Done (1994) is an absurdist comedy about the all but uncontrollable flow of data and money through Switzerland. Augusteb "loved it." In Ghetto (1997), we follow a group of teens through an anarchic class room, a basement disco and into the night. "Allow the film 15 minutes to start sinking into you," advises Giammiz, "and then you are going to love it."
Happiness Is a Warm Gun (2001) offers "variations on a true story," as the tagline goes, namely, that of Petra Kelly, a cofounder of the German Green Party who, in 1992, was shot dead while she slept by her partner, ex-general and Green politician Gert Bastian. Happiness screened in Berlin, Locarno and also won a Zurich Film Award.
Lenz (2006, image above) tells the story of a filmmaker researching Georg Büchner's novel fragment Lenz. In August, Tsienni wrote: "Thanks to an empathetic show of sensitivity and personableness, this film manages to weave those little seemingly banal moments from one man's quaint inner quest into a beautiful visual hymn of veritable life."
If you read German, by the way, Michael Sennhauser writes about Imbach's work in a recent issue of film-dienst. But of course, you won't need to know German to watch Films of Thomas Imbach here on MUBI.