Mirage de la vie: portrait de Douglas Sirk

The great German director Douglas Sirk talks about himself in front of the camera, alongside with his wife Hilde Jary: his rejection of Nazism, his films for the German UFA, his escape to the United States, his work in the Hollywood studios, his obsession with the composition of the shot and for the mirrors. Meanwhile, the Lugano sun filters through the windows of his house in Switzerland, and illuminates both him and his wife, giving him the opportunity, despite his sight problems, to find perfect moments of light in his director’s eyes even during the interview.

The Swiss Daniel Schmid talks with the one he and Rainer Werner Fassbinder considered and venerated as the absolute master of melodrama, the director of There’s Always Tomorrow, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life. His questions interrogate the eyes, the hands and the expressions of a director who is always serious and concentrated, always interested in the deepest dramas of human beings, in their psyche, in their useless search for morality, in their running in circles as a dark preamble of death.

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