UNREST (UNRUEH) Discovery

It is the 1870s and nestled in the lush Swiss Jura Mountains is the watchmaking town of St. Imier. When Russian traveler Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) arrives, intent on drawing a more accurate map of the region, he meets Josephine (Clara Gostynski), a worker at a wristwatch factory that has become a hub for the local anarchist movement. Here, mostly women workers organize to support labor rights internationally and prepare for attempts to quash their movement. As the tiny Swiss town hastens to modernize and to adapt to a newly globalized capitalism and resistance, there are rumblings of synchronizing the time-standard between one of the four that the town straddles: factory time, municipal time, telegraph time and railway time. Precisely balanced between a delicate playfulness and a formal rigor, the historical and the modern, UNREST heralds an exciting new talent in Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin. –Malin Kan