The Cinematheque

In Person: Ivo Zen

A small alpine community reckons with an unspoken tragedy in Swiss documentarian Ivo Zen’s poignant film, which premiered at Visions du Réel in Nyon. Upper Engadine, nestled within the mountain ranges of the Eastern Alps, is a picture-postcard destination for sky gazing and winter sports. The locals know firsthand, however, that the trade-off for such scenery is a life of relative solitude—a life particularly testing for experience-hungry kids. In the 1980s, on the crest of a youth-led counterculture sweeping Switzerland, hard drugs arrived in Engadine and extinguished the lives of many teens and young adults in the valley. The stigma and pain attached to this episode turned it into a taboo subject, a trauma shared but suffered in silence. Reopening the past with care and admirable intent, Zen’s powerful documentary affords space for a still-grieving township to engage in frank, vulnerable dialogue about substance abuse and the epidemic that claimed its children.

In Swiss German with English subtitles

Post-screening panel discussion with Rachel Carter, director of research at the BC Centre for Palliative Care; Ervin Malakaj, director of the Centre for European Studies at the University of British Columbia; and Ivo Zen, director of Under Blue Skies.