Andreas Löffel

Fredi M. Murer wrote and directed this Swiss drama about a family with a missing child. The only explanation seems to be kidnapping, but no ransom note arrives. Police inspector Anatol Wasser (Hanspeter Muller) soon faces an elaborate mystery: a dozen Swiss children vanish with no indication of any pattern -- other than the fact that they all lived near lakes. Is organized crime responsible, or does the answer lie in mystical realms? Shown at the 1998 Montreal Film Festival.

Jack, who has all but failed at life, dreams of a fresh beginning abroad. Instead, he unexpectedly has to take care of his hated father Paul, who he has not seen since childhood. Paul suffers from Alzheimer's and wants to make peace with his son while he still can. But Jack has very different plans for Paul. Two worlds collide, and a journey to Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, turns into an odyssey back to a painfully suppressed past.

Bingo and Sturzi became friends in prison and have big plans. After their release, they both want to turn their backs on a life of crime and emigrate to Brazil. When Sturzi is released from prison six months after Bingo, he discovers that his friend is still broke and even has criminal plans again. Sturzi, who has grown older and wiser in prison, is deeply disappointed, but wants to generously pay for the plane tickets out of his small fortune. His guardian disagrees: Sturzi is to go to a men's shelter and pay off his debts first. When he witnesses how amateurishly Bingo and his buddy Schorschi are planning a bank robbery, the old professional in Sturzi awakens.

The trial of the case, which has become known under the catchphrase "Murder in Kehrsatz", triggered a great deal of public sympathy and, after the verdict, considerable protest. This came out primarily from a jury member of the process. She, a housewife and SVP member, began to have more and more doubts about a judiciary that apparently no longer works according to the principle "in the case of doubt for the accused". The film tells the story of these jurors during the long trial.

Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD in Germany, ORF in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland.