Alpine Fire

1985 [GERMAN]

Drama

2
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 78%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 78% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 7.0/10 10 1127 1.1K

incest

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Plot summary

A year on an Alpine farm: an older couple have two children, Belli, who wanted to be a teacher, and the younger Franzi, deaf, and although he works like a man, child-like. Belli teaches him. In his work, he can become frustrated, so when he throws an expensive mower over a cliff in a fit of pique, his father banishes him to the outskirts of the farm, where he uses pubescent energy to break rocks and build walls and cairns. (It's the tradition of the father's family, called "The Irascibles" by neighbors, to spend puberty doing this.) Belli visits him and they begin sleeping together. By winter, the boy is back in the house and Belli is pregnant. Soon her parents must know.

Director

Fredi M. Murer Photo
Fredi M. Murer

Top cast

Tino Arnold Photo
Tino Arnold as Vater / Father
Irene Calcagni Photo
Irene Calcagni as Belli / Daughter
Annemarie Germann Photo
Annemarie Germann as Mutter / Mother
Jörg Odermatt Photo
Jörg Odermatt as Großvater / Grandfather
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
1.02 GB
1280*772
German 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
25 fps
1 hr 53 min
Seeds 5
1.9 GB
1792*1080
German 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
25 fps
1 hr 53 min
Seeds 8

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by tfdill

Love may or may not overcome

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.
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Reviewed by Drogo_Tighfield 10 / 10

Lovely and mysterious masterpiece

I saw this movie in the Filmoteca of my city, Zaragoza, in a cycle of contemporary Swiss cinema, without any ideas above it, and I discovered a movie astonishing, narrated of the most personal way. It's nothing conventional, in spite of it's a film located in mountains and with a family of farmers (no, it's not Heidi).

This hardest history includes very interesting transgressions like the incest of two brothers, where he, in addition, is mental delayed and to whom interest the feminine bodies more and more to him, so not known in those places for him.

In Spain I at least do not have certainty of which it was released, in the year of its accomplishment, 1985.

Finally, in press book which I saw of this film he put a thing that called the attention to me; "this film it could have been invented by Buñuel...or a Japanese". I agree.

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