Lineup Marche du Film 2023

Cows on the Roof

Anche stanotte le mucche danzeranno sul tetto
directed by Aldo Gugolz
documentary
2020
Switzerland
82 min
Swiss German, Italian
Tags
Festivals and Awards
Synopsis

Fabiano is haunted by nightmares. They are a reflection of his life as the heir of his father’s small-scale agricultural business, located in an isolated valley of Southern Switzerland. He owns fifty goats and eight cows and is trying his best to produce the special alp cheese that first made his hippie parents back in the 1980s. But nothing is going the way it should... He is in debt, the alpine hut that he rents for the summer is dilapidated, and the goats cheese business is no longer profitable. His thoughts wander back to a fatal accident occurred the previous year to a Macedonian illegal worker. His death is haunting him, because he feels that he is at least in part responsible for it. Fabiano is not exactly in a good place to start a family, but will be a father soon. His girlfriend Eva is expecting – and is hoping to fulfill her dreams of a simple life surrounded by nature and animals. But how can they build a life together in such difficult circumstances?

Crew
original idea and treatment Susanne Schüle, Aldo Gugolz
cinematography Susanne Schüle
assistant director Nicola Maccanetti
production assistant Patrick Micaroni
sound recordists Rico Andriolo, Vittorio Castellano, Marco Viale
editing Samir Samperisi
film editing consultant Nino Kirtadze
sound editing Riccardo Studer, Alessandra Modugno
sound mix Dominik Raetz
color grading Juan Galva
video and sound post-production studio Rotor Film GmbH, Berlin
music Stone Leaf
titles and graphics Isabelle Mauchle
press agent Eric Bouzigon - Filmsuite
production by revolumenfilmROUGH CAT
Press
“That being said, once the discovery is made, the fear stays with Fabiano, slowly eating him up. It’s the not knowing that makes it all worse: not knowing if the man he once knew simply slipped and fell to his death, or if there was something more sinister at play. Still, it would be hard to pinpoint what Gugolz’s focus is here. Does it have to do with fighting for this alternative lifestyle, even though, ironically enough, it actually seems to be sucking the life out of people? Or the realisation that sometimes it’s just too late for a change, too late to move to one of these towns where “everything is grey” and one can’t really breathe any more?”
Marta Bałaga, CINEUROPE
“La vita, dura, di Fabiano ed Eva è comunque legata ai cicli della natura, indissolubilmente. Viene messa in parallelo la vacca che partorisce mentre la stessa Eva è incinta. Lei vuole allontanarsi, da quella vita e dal lavoro quotidiano, solo per lo stretto necessario per il parto in clinica. Per lei è importante rimanere lì durante la gravidanza, lo dice accarezzando una capretta. Dopodiché il bimbo vivrà all’aria aperta. Anche stanotte le mucche danzeranno sul tetto segue quei ritmi di vita contadina. I vitellini che vengono alla luce, massaggiati, il pascolo delle capre, la mungitura, l’attività casearia. Una vita rurale destinata a scomparire nell’indifferenza generale, laddove naturalmente la natura è anche matrigna. In quelle valli sono frequenti gli acquazzoni e si creano numerosi fulmini che possono essere pericolosi.”
Giampiero Raganelli, QUINLAN.IT
“Aldo Gugolz' Dokumentation verzahnt Bergbauernporträt und Kriminalfall so stimmig, dass sie selbst davon überrumpelt zu sein scheint. Impressionen der garstigen Landschaft und der vom Leben gezeichneten Persönlichkeiten lassen immer wieder vermuten, wo diese Geschichte hingehen könnte. So wird die Spannung konstant hoch gehalten - und der Film zum Schluss unverhofft brisant.”
Tom von Arx, FILMKRITIK
Notes from the director

In the course of a lifetime, your choices narrow down. At 20, the world’s your oyster. At 40, you start to realize that many small decisions of the past have almost unnoticeably shaped your life in such a way that it has become almost inescapable. Smoothly and without a noise, doors have closed that you believed to be wide open. Much of what influences our paths in life is inconspicuous until we become sucked into a direction that we cannot change easily.

I have noticed this in my own life, and can see it with particular clarity in the life of my film’s central character Fabiano. Beyond the tragic event in the midst of which he unfortunately found himself a few years ago, just before the shooting of the film - which inevitably blows like an echo on the background of the whole film, telling the story of the fragility of our lives - is this aspect of his story that I am most interested in. The second generation (and soon the third one, too) has been born into a world which they haven’t quite chosen for themselves. Or are they living a life they chose freely?

Being trapped in your existence – that's the story behind what is visible, behind the reality that I film. It is a feeling that my protagonist is not talking about. The pressure he is under is palpable to me. But while the external reasons for this pressure are obvious, what they trigger in Fabiano is not, and he doesn’t express it with words either. Nor does he spell out what caused him to stay and accept his hippies parents’ heritage in the first place.

I wanted to convey what is happening with Fabiano in a subtile, sometimes dreamy and nuanced way and enable the viewer to feel what is invisible. Accompanying Fabiano and his girlfriend Eva in the bustle of their complicated everyday life, the film also tells about the last breaths of a rural world whose survival, based essentially on cheese production, it’s now highly endangered. And it also wants to take a close and immersive look into life in a remote peripheral valley of Southern Switzerland, a region dominated by a powerful and wild nature, which was almost entirely abandoned in the '70s before a generation of young Swiss German hippies arrived there to try out new ways of life.

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