Neracher hopes to talent spot on Zurich jury duty

In fact, he’s using it to his advantage. “From a practical working point of view, it’s a great chance for me to discover new directors and actors,” says Neracher, who will have the task of judging the eight films in the festival’s German Language Feature Competition along with fellow jurors including the Austrian director Jessica Hausner.

Neracher, who runs Zurich-based production company HugoFilm with partners Christian Davi and Thomas Thümena, will begin production in late October on Euros 4.5m German-Austrian-Swiss co-production Ruhm, an episodic film to be directed by German film-maker Isabel Kleefeld.

Also gearing up to shoot next month is Kill Me (Tote Mich), an arthouse drama/thriller about a suicidal young girl who makes a deal with a ninja criminal on the run to Marseilles. The Swiss/German/French co-production is being directed by German director Emily Atef. Hugo’s projects in development include Sabine Boss’s Hopskotch, Niklaus Hilber’s Soul Catcher and Francois Bovy’s Thirst.

Neracher says that even though the current slate of films consists almost entirely of international co-productions, that’s not due to a lack of lcoal talent. “From a creative point of view Switzerland has some very interesting talent and stories, but we are a small country, with more than one language, and we want our films to travel and find an audience, so it makes sense for us to do co-productions,” says Neracher, who started producing documentaries for HugoFilm before making the break into fiction features with Fredi M Murer’s hit Vitus. Neracher notes that a US company recently bought remake rights to that film.

HugoFilm is churning out features, but what are the challenges facing the Swiss production sector right now? “I think one of the problems is that we don’t often do crowd pleasers in Switzerland, we have a tendency to make intelligent arthouse films. Because our market is so small, we strongly rely on public money, so I think we should be making films that appeal to larger audiences, then we might get more funding.”

With three of the eight films in this year’s German-language competition line-up being Swiss, Neracher doesn’t think it will be too hard to stay unbiased. “I will try to be impartial, which I think will be easy, because I either like a film or don’t. Maybe subconsciously the Swiss films will be more familiar, but then the others could be more exotic, so it could go either way.”