Il falò

"Hoehenfeuer" intimately shows the powerful and sad story of a family in the Swiss alps, living far from the next village, and its deaf son who not only feels trapped in his lack of hearing but also in the narrow-minded context of the family.

Its beautiful camera shows the alps how they really are (or at least were): the old snow, the sleeping trees, the cold, wet air, the hard life.

The film is gnarled like the old trees standing there and looking at what these poor people do, how the story inevitably goes where it has to go.

If you say "drama in the winter alps", I say "Hoehenfeuer" for sure.

this is a peculiar film. In the bucolic mountain settings of swiss alps, a rural family raising cows and living in a mountain hut, struggles with the awkward behavior of the deaf child. The sudden ending is an anti-climax. As the mountain fog envelops the hut and the family, with the cow's neck bells in the audio background, the movie ends, the lights in the theater are turned on, and one has to wonder what the message was. Definitely *not* the average story of swiss alps family.

No, I'm not into Heimatfilm!!! The more I'm delighted by finding this masterstroke by Fredi Murer. A film that can't be compared to anything I've yet. The swiss alps are home and place of this drama. Bub and Belli are sisters and they fall in love; mostly cause there is no one else to fall in love with on their father's farm. The actors do amazing work on their difficult characters while the whole setting is beautiful and depressing at once... Even humor isn't completely lacking in this drama!

A film that produces unforgettable moods and scenes....

Watch it!!!

It is impossible to speak of the central fact of the plot of this lovely film without spoiling it, but it is worth mentioning that it draws on (and asks to be compared to) Alpine folktales. The isolation of the family is an aspect of many Swiss and other montagnard tales; in this film, the tension between the lure of the modern world (it happens in 1984, after all) and the traditional ways of the mountain is constantly there, but somewhat subdued. The choice of the family to keep their deaf son at home (rather than institutionalizing him) leads to dramatic complications and precipitates the startling conclusion (not "inadequate," in my view, but definitely open to varied interpretation). That the son breaks rock--both as punishment and as a kind of affirmation of his connection to the natural world--while the mother continues prayers to the Blessed Virgin that seem never to have been answered, nor likely to be--also link the story to traditional folktales. Overall, it has that in common with John Sayles's Secret of Roan Inish and perhaps Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, but there is very little reverence for the past in this film, as contrasted with those others. It is definitely a film worth renting and viewing. Slow, yes, but intense.

This is a really interesting movie with an open end. For me, Johanna Lier, who played Belli, did a great job and made this movie really good.