Master
film studies

FILM STUDIES

Romania Grand Voyage workshop

with Radu Jude

<meta charset="UTF-8">On the first year of their Master degree, students embark on a “Grand Voyage” to discover the region and a filmmaker. In 2025, they went to Romania.

FILM STUDIES

Kosovo Grand Voyage workshop

with Kaltrina Krasniqi

Each year, students of the Master's program undertake a "Great Trip" to discover the territory of a filmmaker. In 2022, they went to Kosovo with the director and screenwriter Kaltrina Krasniqi.

FILM STUDIES

Directing workshop with Yann Gonzalez

with Yann Gonzalez

In partnership with La Manufacture, the Master Cinema ECAL/HEAD  invited director Yann Gonzalez to take part in a directing workshop.

FILM STUDIES

Actors' Direction Workshop

with Fulvio Bernasconi

Actors' Direction Workshop, led by the Swiss filmmaker Fulvio Bernasconi, in collaboration with the acting students of Les Teintureries, theatre school in Lausanne.

FILM STUDIES

O Signore Stracciarolo

with Jean Perret, Gianfranco Rosi

Outcast amongst outcasts. From boredom to religious devotion, we get a glimpse into the lives of a gypsy couple in the suburbs of Rome.

FILM STUDIES

Ponte 5

with Jean Perret, Gianfranco Rosi

One man. One bridge. Nowhere to go. Antonio is an aging man who must live on a bridge in the rough neighborhood of Laurentino 38, in the suburbs of Rome.

FILM STUDIES

Ruth

with Lionel Baier, Emmanuel Salinger

Ruth leads a peaceful life in her elaborately decorated apartment. Until one day, when a mysterious gift is about to turn her world upside down.

FILM STUDIES

Il movimento

with Lionel Baier, Thomas Isler

The “habitués” of the bar “Il Movimento” meet regularly to discuss, drink and to forget their worries. This tiny bar is particularly cosy with a warm and charming ambience...

FILM STUDIES

Cotonov Vanished

with Jean-Louis Comolli, José Michel Bühler, Claudio Pazienza

A way of approaching the exercise of portrait, Cotonov Vanished returns to the dazzling career of a young and brilliant Russian interpreter embarked in the Cold War who, one day, mysteriously disappeared...

FILM STUDIES

Directing workshop with Alejo Moguillansky

with Alejo Moguillansky

A 1 week filmmaking workshop led by the Argentinian director, screenwriter and producer Alejo Moguillansky with the students of the Master in Film - major direction.

FILM STUDIES

Filmmaking workshop

with Danielle Lessovitz

A 2-weeks filmmaking workshop led by the American director and scriptwriter Danielle Lessovitz with the students of the Master in Film - major direction and scriptwriting.

FILM STUDIES

Master Cinema - Major in Sound

with Felix Blume

Sound creation workshop for the Master Cinema students - Major in Sound - directed by Felix Blume, sound artist and sound engineer.

FILM STUDIES

Sound performance

Creation by Ensemble Vide, with the Master Cinema students, in coproduction with Ensemble Contrechamps, Geneva.

FILM STUDIES

Workshop Rousseau mandate

Study trip of the Master in Film students in Val de Travers, on the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to work on the first stages of the Mandate proposed by the MLR - Maison Rousseau et Littérature, Geneva.

FILM STUDIES

"I Dreamed of El Zahir"

by Vuk Vukmanovic

"I Dreamed of El Zahir" , sound work by Vuk Vukmanovic, student of Master Cinéma - major Sound, during the Grand Voyage in Dakar, Senegal. Inspired by the short story "El Zahir" by Jorge Luis Borges.

FILM STUDIES

Workshop casting and acting with Guillaume Brac

with Guillaume Brac

Workshop casting and acting with Guillaume Brac, filmmaker, Julia Perazzini and Antonin Schopfer, actors

FILM STUDIES

Cinema Master - major Sound

Vuk Vukmanović, student in Master cinema - major Sound, on the set of "Red Jungle" by Juan José Lozano and Zoltán Horváth, 2019 (prod. Intermezzo Films; Dolce Vita Films; Nadasdy Films & Tchack)

FILM STUDIES

Master Cinema at the Clermont Film Festival

FILM STUDIES

Mumbai Grand Voyage workshop

Each year, students of the Master's program undertake a "Great Trip" to discover the territory of a filmmaker. In 2016, they went to Mumbai with the director and producer Anurag Kashyap.

FILM STUDIES

Anna Joos – Niederurnen, GL

with Verena Paravel

Once called ‘the magic material', asbestos has become an invisible evil. In a forgotten valley of Switzerland, death, carried by the wind, forever and ever accompanies the everyday lives of the Italian asbestos factory workers. They are silenced by the Swiss industrial state. But the insides of their bodies bear witness to their story: their asbestos-injured lungs breathe in and out, intermingling with the repetitive industrial sounds, like heartbeats, in which they were once immersed. The binary rhythm of the Tarantella, a southern Italian ritual, once had the power to counter an invisible evil.

FILM STUDIES

Antoine Scalese – Hypersex

with Anne Brouillet

My diploma project is a screenplay for a feature film titled Hypersex, exploring the fantasy romance genre. It tells the story of Alfa, a young man who lends his appearance to a model of a sex android and manages to divert one sample in hopes of restoring lost intimacy with his elusive partner. Quickly, by substituting it for himself, he loses control of the situation and finds himself confronted with intense affects. This screenplay uses sexuality as a fully-fledged dramatic force within the overall narrative dynamic. Intertwined with this, the narrative rhetoric of love's return offers a queer perspective to the film, portraying the complex relationship between two male characters who, despite their selfish behaviors, choose not to give up on each other.

FILM STUDIES

Jonathan Daza Ospina – Silencio

with Verena Paravel

Silencio is a hybrid film that narrates the story of a sound recorder from a big city in Colombia who goes to the jungles in the pacific coast, in search of the sounds from a past that is still haunting the present. A personal journey where she meets local activists of different generations engaged with the preservation of memory, and where music and oral traditions enact as liminal spaces in which mourning invokes and shakes the ghosts of a colonial heritage before the promises of the future. It is a film that traces a cartography of sound and archives the ecological present from a historical perspective, examining sensorially the embodiments of resistance in contexts of armed conflict in the west of Colombia.

FILM STUDIES

Pablo Guscetti – Chi ch'ien piü chiö

with Katharina Wyss

Nena, 40, lives in the valley in Ticino where she grew up. Giulia, an urbanite in her thirties, is visiting her family's village for the first time in order to conduct field research for her post-doctorate. Nena reluctantly acts as Giulia's research guide. Animosity grows quickly between the two. The protagonists discover that mysterious and murderous attacks are ravaging the valley they left behind. Panic-stricken, the two women head for a high-altitude refuge. But this respite is quickly replaced by heartbreak. The storm is close, and so are the and monsters. Giulia and Nena face each other in the midst of horror.

FILM STUDIES

Theofanis Papadopoulos – Firelight

with Katharina Wyss

Firelight explores my fear of non-existence after death and that of imagining to no longer interact with an environment. It confronts the characters with the lies they tell themselves, in order to be able to survive in this absurd situation. It is about an awareness and the point of no return, where, confronted with reality, we also become aware of the fact to vainly create meaning in our lives, to make them livable. Thus, we hide from the mortal misery that awaits us every day, as in every room of the mansion. We create meanings and explanations to comfort ourselves, except that being aware of it and accepting this absurdity is equivalent to no longer being afraid of it.

FILM STUDIES

Valentina Parati – Acciaio

with Verena Paravel

A lullaby of engines and love, this short movie is an emotional and hypersensorial journey into the deep world of mechanophilia.

FILM STUDIES

Loris Ciaburri – Lux Vitae

with Anne Brouillet

Lux Vitae is a feature-length screenplay developed over two years as part of the ECAL/HEAD Master of Cinema program. The project was built from a synopsis, through various treatment versions to a V1 screenplay. Anne Brouillet supervised the writing process throughout. Lux Vitae is a film set in La Chaux-de-Fonds, incorporating the local socio-historical context. The film follows the story of Anica, a polyamorous, pansexual watchmaker who, following an accident, becomes a paraplegic. Her sex life is limited, so she decides to seek assisted suicide and meets Max, an EXIT counsellor. These two people, totally opposed in their sexuality, come together and bond intimately.

FILM STUDIES

Loïs de Goumoëns – Rase Campagne

with Anne Brouillet

Rase Campagne is a feature-length comedy screenplay project. It tells the story of Elia, a helpful and polite young woman from Vaud, Switzerland, who lives in fear of disturbing... or even worse, of disappointing. One day, a ZAD arrives in her quiet region and through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, we believe she is one of the ZADists! Elia will try to prove the opposite but the adventure will prove difficult when the different forces present try to rally her to their cause. In this story, I am interested in probing Swiss “neutrality” and the consequences of refusing commitment, whether emotional or political. The project is at the V1 stage and is therefore under development.

FILM STUDIES

Sara Dutch – Mife et Miso vont en bateau

with Elene Naveriani

In the near future, Xzir, a woman in her thirties, finds herself faced with an unwanted pregnancy. In the ultra-digital, techno-authoritarian society in which she lives, pregnancies are automatically entered in a national register and monitored by the state, abortions are banned. Xzir is going to take the illegal path of the DarkWeb to her pregnancy, whatever the cost.

FILM STUDIES

Fei Fan – Fenni in Wonderland

with Elene Naveriani

Fenni in Wonderland is a short fiction film in which I also use a documentary approach. In this film, the boundary between reality and dream is blurred by magical realism in order to represent the Chinese immigrant community in Paris through my personal point of view.

FILM STUDIES

Saleh Kashefi – Overture

with Katharina Wyss

Beneath all the noise lays silence. Overture is a cinematic journey which tries to illustrate how silence can be covered with noise through telling a typical story of a human being and their way of coping with life’s suffering in the modern world.

FILM STUDIES

Léa Célestine Bernasconi – The mountains are still growing (Sound)

with Nathalie Vidal

My job was to create the soundtrack for this film from sound recording to mixing and editing.

OTHER

Cycle de conférences « Ecrire le cinéma »

How is cinema approached, told, understood, criticized, admired and heckled, what reflections, meditations and musings does it inspire, what pleasures and displeasures does it nourish?

PROJECTION

ECAL at Locarno Film Festival,
07–17.08.2024,
Locarno

On the occasion of the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, many graduates of ECAL will present movies