Unrest

A playfully formalist study of a Swiss anarchist movement at the dawn of global capitalism, awarded Best Director in the Berlinale’s Encounters section.

Writer/director/editor Cyril Schäublin (Those Who Are Fine) imagines an episode in the real-life visit of Russian polymath and activist Pyotr Kropotkin to Switzerland in the 1870s, wherein he chances upon the watchmaking enclave of Saint-Imier in the Jura Mountains. There, he falls in love with Josephine, an assembly-line worker at the local factory, and decides to sow the seeds of anarchy.

(Dis)order is a key theme of this deceptively placid film: Josephine is responsible for installing the crucial titular unrueh (‘unrest’) wheel that holds the town’s timekeeping mechanism in balance, while Saint-Imier itself exists through a precarious balance between its internationally connected radicalised workers and their not-quite-ascendant capitalist masters. Aided by the decentred, deep-focus compositions of DOP Silvan Hillmann, Schäublin achieves a serene long-take style that finds, in the minutiae of watchmaking, a witty metaphor for the ordering of society by technology and a Marxian critique of our alienating means of production.

“A gorgeously playful oddity … Expertly balanced, as though by precision pincers under a magnifier, between the heavy ideas on its mind and the mischievous lightness in its heart.” – Variety