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Alain Tanner
Life Time
6 December 1929 - 11 September 2022
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The director is the son of an artist writer and an actress mother. He studied economics at Calvin College in Geneva but became interested in film early and after graduating from college went to London where he worked as an apprentice at the British Film Institute. There, together with compatriot Claude Goretta, he directed a hidden camera short film, Nice Time, about the nightlife on Piccadilly, which won the prize for an experimental film at the IFF in Venice in 1957. The following year he worked
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The director is the son of an artist writer and an actress mother. He studied economics at Calvin College in Geneva but became interested in film early and after graduating from college went to London where he worked as an apprentice at the British Film Institute. There, together with compatriot Claude Goretta, he directed a hidden camera short film, Nice Time, about the nightlife on Piccadilly, which won the prize for an experimental film at the IFF in Venice in 1957. The following year he worked for the BBC as an assistant producer of documentaries. He then spent some time in Paris and returned home, where he began directing films in French for Swiss TV. With four other filmmakers in 1966, Tanner formed the Group of Five (Groupe Cinq) and two years later began directing the first film of this cooperative and his own first feature film, Charles - Mort ou vif/Charles - Dead or Alive. Considering the resurgence of Swiss cinema, the film, which was an exploratory look at a critical moment in the life of a wealthy industrialist, won first prize at the Locke Festival in 1969. Since then, Tanner has established himself as Switzerland’s most famous and talented filmmaker and politically the most familiar name in international festivals. He staged a remote Brecht film that draws attention to its artificiality and tries to attract the viewer to a kind of dialogue. He writes his own scripts alone or co-wrote mostly with John Berger. They won the Best Screenplay Award from the American National Society of Film Critics for Jonas, 25 Years Old in 2000 (1976), which humorously explores the impact of the 1968 Paris riots on the lives of eight characters. Tanner won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes for his next film Light Years Away (1981). Most of his films are co-produced by France and Switzerland. His work became the subject of the documentary film "Cinema - Dead or Living" filmed by the Zurich Filmcollective in the late 1970s. His wife Jeannine is a former actress.