Lionel Baier

Director

December 13, 1975 (50 years)

Lausanne, Switzerland

Biography

Lionel Baier is a Swiss filmmaker. He studied Art at University of Lausanne from 1995–98. In 2009, he co-founded the production company Bande à Part films, together with Ursula Meier, Jean-Stéphane Bron and Frédéric Mermoud.

Filmography

5.6

Stupid Boy

This coming-of-age drama deals with a young man, realizing who he really is and which things he will never do...

5.5

Vanity

David Miller wants to die and chooses assisted euthanasia. He planned everything: the place, the time and the manner. However, nothing goes right. With Esperanza, member of the association, and Tréplev, young prostitute, David embarks on his ultimate night with total strangers.

N/A

Toulouse

August 1st, somewhere in the Aubonne countryside, Cécile and her ten-year-old daughter Marion have just acquired an old 1970’s Ford Taunus estate car. But the roads through the region at the heart of the north shore of Lake Geneva are much longer and strewn with pitfalls than would appear and their voyage is delayed incessantly. Perhaps, however, the way ahead will open up for Cécile and Marion once the problems have been solved. As far as the moon.

5.8

Continental Drift (South)

Nathalie Adler is on a mission for the EU in Sicily. She organizes the next visit of Macron and Merkel to a migrant camp. Their presence has a high symbolic value to show that everything is under control. But who still wants to believe in this European family on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Probably not Albert, Nathalie's son, an NGO activist who arrives without warning. He, moreover, no longer believes in his mother.

5.6

Longwave

It is April 1974 and Julie Dujonc-Renens, young feminist journalist and the cunning Joseph-Marie Cauvin, leading reporter for the Swiss radio, have been sent to Portugal to investigate Switzerland’s aid to poor countries. Sparks fly during the bus trip with Bob, sound engineer approaching retirement. The projects financed by Switzerland prove to be calamitous and the workers’ revolution that suddenly breaks out doesn’t help, obliging our heroes to disregard first the radio’s management, and then their own codes of conduct.

5.0

Stealth

Lionel is a happy gay man with a great career and an open-minded family that accepts his loyal lover, Serge. But things start to unravel when he meets a pretty Polish immigrant who is about to be deported and decides to marry her.

5.1

Prénom: Mathieu

Seventeen-year-old Mathieu Reymond lies brutally battered and raped in a field of reeds. It is only after his release from hospital that the memories come back, unannounced and fragmentary, but still so precise that regular meetings with two police officers not only allow the perpetrator’s identikit image to take shape, but also the chronology of the crime itself.

N/A

Bon vent Claude Goretta

Claude Goretta directed “L'invitation” in 1973. For filmmaker Lionel Baier, born in 1975, it is like a “travelling companion”, to adapt Serge Daney’s expression. He feels it is definitive proof that a Swiss can be deeply Chekhovian. The young filmmaker goes to Geneva to ask his elder how he achieved the whoosh of water effect in the film, why attention to detail matters so much, and how to film great actors such as François Simon. This encounter with Claude Goretta – but also with Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, Michel Robin and Frédérique Meininger – leads one of the greatest of Swiss filmmakers to open up about his work.

5.7

The Safe House

An eccentric family portrait set during the May 1968 protests in Paris. A nine-year-old boy stays with his grandparents and uncles while his parents protest. When an illustrious guest seeks refuge in the apartment, the family’s dynamics change.

8.0

Low Cost (Claude Jutra)

Since he is 9 years old, David Miller has known the date of the day he dies. As it nears, he meets those he cares about for the last time, obsessed by the idea of learning how to tie a tie and by the the fall into water of the Quebecker filmmaker Claude Jutra. Shot with a cellphone over a decade, from Lausanne to Ouagadougou, Low Cost (Claude Jutra) is a small fiction about the market value of a human life in a time when everything is discounted. Life is priceless, death, however, negotiates…

5.2

Another Man

Psychological drama about a young, inexperienced film reviewer who falls for the charms of a well-established female colleague. A challenging look at the essence of film critique as well as an erotic encounter between two unequals.

2.0

Émile de 1 à 5

Two young men are playing in a bathtub. Then a third and fourth slip in to join them. They are called Émile and they are looking for their “perfect mother” when a fifth man arrives, the Émile who reconciles them all.

N/A

Celui au pasteur

A film in the first person, in which the son casts a both tender and cruel gaze on his father, a minister in the canton of Vaud at the end of the 20th century.

6.8

La parade (notre histoire)

Parades to demonstrate gay pride may be a well-established fact of life in cities such as Paris and Berlin – but this is not the case in Sion. In this Catholic stronghold, which is also capital of the ruggedly mountainous Swiss canton of Valais, a group of six women and a man, led by Marianne Bruchez, dared to organise the first gay parade ever held in this small provincial town. The date: July 2001.

10.0

Mignon à croquer

Each morning Laura B., a school teacher, pays great attention to the goings-on in the courtyard, watching attentively from her window as mothers drop their children off at the school, giving them a bag with something nice to eat for the 10 o'clock break. On this particular morning, it is Loïc's mille feuilles that attracts the teacher's attention.

You've seen it all! · 15 titles displayed