Brought up in Altdorf, in Canton Uri, Fredi M. Murer, born in 1940, studied photography at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. A talented draftsman and photographer, with a subtle imagination, he soon approached the language of film, shooting a series of portraits of his artist friends who were breaking away from the values of that time (Chicorée, presented at Locarno in 1967, and Bernhard Luginbühl, both dated 1966, and Passagen, 1972).
He progressively moved towards the quiet rural Alpine world, to which he has given a voice. At the beginning of the Seventies, he founded the production company Nemo Film, then signed his first great documentary Wir Bergler in den Bergen sind eigentlich nicht schuld, dass wir da sind (1974), about mountain farmers in the Uri valleys, and his first feature-length film Zones (1979), a complex and sophisticated metaphor for the conformist atmosphere which reigned in Switzerland before youth rebellions in the early Eighties.
But the real turning point came with Alpine fire (1985), recounting the incestuous love of two siblings isolated in a mountain pasture out of the world. The film struck the Swiss public profoundly and won the Pardo d’oro at Locarno. Then came Sehen mit anderen Augen (1987) and the great documentary Der grüne Berg (1990). Vollmond (1998) won the Grand Prix of the Americas at the Montreal Film Festival. In 2006 he filmed Vitus (2006), played by Bruno Ganz, which earned him the Swiss Film Prize for Best Feature Film, as well as several international awards. His most recent film, based on a novel written by his mother, is Liebe und Zufall (2014).
Locarno Festival
