22/04/2005

Fredi M. Murer the rare is back. Now 65 years old, the German-speaking Swiss filmmaker who filmed the masterpiece Höhenfeuer,Golden Leopard at the Locarno Festival in 1985, the anti-nuclear masterly documentary Der grüne Berg (1990), and, more recently Vollmond (1998), has started shooting his new film Vitus earlier this month.

Once again, Fredi M. Murer’s plot focuses on childhood as a refuge for hope and utopia. The director gathered around him a team of new Swiss talents to assist him in the writing of the script. Among them, noticeably, Peter Luisi, who shot Verflixt Verliebt, a German-speaking comedy greatly successful last year. Vitus is an exceptionally gifted youth whose career as a pianist has been planned by his parents since his childhood. He decides one day to escape from an all too foreseeable life to follow his own “star”. According to Murer, his hero’s trajectory resembles that of geniuses such as Kaspar Hauser, Mozart, Simplicissimus or Einstein.

The actor Bruno Ganz, as the understanding grand-father, plays with Theo Gheorghiu, an international piano laureate starring as Vitus. The film is a production of the young Zurich company Hugofilm, owned by filmmakers Christian Davi, Thomas Thümena, and by Christof Neracher. In association with Fredi M. Murer, Christian Davi has noticeably co-directed Downtown Switzerland, a documentary released in Switzerland towards the end of last year. The soundtrack is composed by Mario Beretta and the photography is by Pio Corradi. Director Rolf Lyssy, who made Die Schweizermacher (1978), the biggest Swiss public success ever, is in charge of the film’s making of. The film will be released in february 2006.

(Translated from French)