In 2024, the production company Praesens-Films will be 100 years old. A unique case in the history of Swiss cinema, the company is still active as a distributor. It produced most of the national cinema’s biggest successes, including such popular films as Luigi Comencini’s Heidi, and conquered Hollywood. It also won no less than three Oscars, including one for the screenplay of Marie-Louise (1944), written by Richard Schweizer and directed by Leopold Lindtberg, which deals with the French children hosted in Switzerland during the war.

Lindtberg was born in Vienna in 1902 and emigrated to Zurich where he began working in the theatre. In 1933, he also directed several of the most important films produced by Praesens, including the famous Die Letzte Chance (The Last Chance, 1945), which powerfully evokes the fate of Jewish refugees during the Second World War and won awards at Cannes and the Golden Globes, and Die Vier im Jeep (1951), which recreates the Allied occupation of Vienna and won the Golden Bear at Berlin.

Read the selection of films curated by Frédéric Maire, Cinémathèque suisse.