1977 film by Daniel Schmid

Satire on 19th-century class relations and thinly veiled commentary on the failure of the 1968 political revolution.

1987 film by Daniel Schmid

A naive girl's love for Switzerland is put to the test in this satiric comedy. Irina is a woman from Russia who all her life has always been fascinated by Switzerland and longs to live there some day, though her notion of Swiss life has more to do with Heidi and old movies set in the Alps than reality.

Beautiful, detached, laconic, consumptive Lily Brest is a streetwalker with few clients. She loves her idle boyfriend Raoul who gambles away what little she earns. The town's power broker, called the rich Jew, discovers she is a good listener, so she's soon busy. Raoul imagines grotesque sex scenes between Lily and the Jew; he leaves her for a man. Her parents, a bitter Fascist who is a cabaret singer in drag and her wheelchair-bound mother, offer no refuge. Even though all have a philosophical bent, the other whores reject Lily because she tolerates everyone, including men. She tires of her lonely life and looks for a way out. Even that act serves the local corrupt powers.

Meet the inhabitants of the "Casa di Riposa" in Milan, the world's first nursing home for retired opera singers, founded by composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1896. In his documentary film Tosca's Kiss, which has developed an underground cult following over the years and is a favorite among opera and music lovers worldwide, director Daniel Schmid has captured a world in which these wonderful singers (many of whom had significant careers on the opera stage) re-live and re-enact their triumphant roles of the glorious past. Tosca's Kiss is a touching and often hilarious film on the subject of aging and the power and timeless capacity of music to inspire.

In Japanese theater, women's roles are traditionally played by men. The man playing the woman's role, the Onnagata, does not imitate the woman, as in the West, but tries to capture her significance. He need not stick close to his model, but draws far more from his own identity - a shift of value takes place, which is nonetheless not a step beyond. THE WRITTEN FACE is an attempt to offer an insight into the Japanese Kabuki star Tamasaburo Bando, one of the last defenders of this ancient and disappearing performing tradition.