Beyond the Horizon

A heatwave hits in the summer of 1976 and the Swiss countryside dries out fast. Inside that stifling weather, Gus, the thirteen year old son of a farmer, watches his family come apart and his own childhood end at the same time. The relationship his mother forms with another woman unsettles the household completely, and the boy has to grow up in the middle of something he does not understand. Delphine Lehericey’s eighty eight minute Belgian Swiss co-production was adapted from Roland Buti’s novel of the same name and keeps the camera firmly at Gus’s eye level; the drought here is not background but a pressure that magnifies everything happening indoors. Laetitia Casta, Clémence Poésy and Luc Bruchez star.