Prolific Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner dies at 92

Swiss film director Alain Tanner, Considered a pioneer of the New Wave film movement in his country, he died this Sunday (09.11.2022) at the age of 92, announced the association that bears his name.

“Internationally renowned Alain Tanner was one of the leading figures in Swiss cinema and is one of the founders of the new Swiss cinema in the 1970s in the company of his colleagues Michel Soutter, Claude Goretta, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange,” added the association in a statement released “according to the family”.

This “Group of Five” renewed the Swiss seventh art, reflecting then the spirit of nonconformity that characterized the time.

“Carlos, dead or alive”, the first feature film by Alain Tanner, a contemporary of the New Wave in France, marks in 1969 the beginning of politically engaged cinema in Switzerland.

That film, which tells the story of a businessman who decided to abandon traditional capitalist life to live on the fringes of society, when student demonstrations were on the rise, won the first prize at the Locarno festival.

Among his best-known works are “The Salamander”, “Jonás will be 25 years old in the year 2000”, “The light years”, which won the Special Jury Grand Prize at the Cannes Festival in 1981, or “In the White City”.