Alpine Fire

On a farm on a mountainside in the Swiss Alps, a family lives: a mother, a father and two children. Belli, the sister, wanted to be a teacher and could not; Franzi, the younger brother, was born deaf, works like a man and can speak to nobody. Belli teaches him to read and to count. When the snow closes the road in winter the house is cut off from the world entirely. Fredi M. Murer's film is about the incestuous relationship that forms between the siblings inside that isolation, and it presents it neither as sensation nor as a criminal file; it watches coolly for what the outcome will be and what the family will do. Most of the cast are not professionals. Shot in the canton of Uri, the film won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 1985 and is counted among the most important works in Swiss cinema.