Filmmaker Alain Tanner passes away

• Tanner was an internationally recognised director who began his career in the late 1950s.
• He is credited with helping to start Switzerland’s own, lesser new wave in the 1970s.
• His first full-length feature film, “Charles, Dead or Alive,” was released in 1969.

Geneva: Alain Tanner, a pioneer of Switzerland’s new wave film movement, died on Sunday at the age of 92, according to his foundation.

“Alain Tanner was one of the beacons of Swiss cinema,” his foundation said in a statement issued in consultation with his family.

Tanner was an internationally recognised director who began his career in the late 1950s and has over two dozen pictures to his credit.

He is credited with helping to start Switzerland’s own, lesser new wave in the 1970s, alongside colleagues Miche Soutter, Claude Goretta, Jean-Louis Roy, and Jean-Jacques Lagrange.

Their “Group of 5” sparked a revival in Swiss cinema that reflected the era’s nonconformist attitude.

Tanner’s first full-length feature film, “Charles, Dead or Alive,” was released in 1969, and it heralded the start of politically involved cinema in Switzerland.

That film, which depicts the narrative of a businessman who decides to quit mainstream capitalist life in order to live on the outskirts of society as student protests flare, earned the top prize at the Locarno film festival.

Among his best-known films are “Jonas who will be 25 in the Year 2000,” from 1976 and “Light Years Away”, which won the Grand Prix at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.

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