“Monte Verità” at the Locarno Film Festival – Culture

There is really no question that the film “Monte Verità” must have its premiere at this location: on the Piazza Grande of Locarno, the central square of the Ticino town, which always turns into a gigantic open-air cinema in August – if not a pandemic, the film festival banished to the digital, like in 2020. This year you can watch films in Locarno like in the past, on the Piazza Grande and in the many film locations in the city.

And that is lucky for the makers of “Monte Verità”, who were able to present their feature film in Locarno, because they tell a story that happened more than 100 years ago just four kilometers from the piazza: on a hill above the Neighboring Ascona, which used to be called Monte Monescia. It was only a group of dropouts who made it the legendary Monte Verità, Mountain of Truth – artists, reformers and non-conformists from Berlin, Transylvania and Belgium who were united by the desire to counter the industrialized metropolises of Europe with a utopia.

In 1907 Hermann Hesse withdrew from alcohol on Monte Verità

In 1900 they bought a piece of land on top of Monte Monescia, founded a cooperative and tried a bold social alternative. Vegetarian diet was just as much a part of it as nudism, naturopathy, women’s emancipation and early forms of modern expressive dance. The bottom line is that the inhabitants of the hill anticipated much of what is still today considered to be a better life in touch with nature.

But the utopia of Monte Verità did not last long. The group split up in the first few years after it was founded: some founded a sanatorium to secure their livelihood, others moved into ruins and fed on fruits and roots in order to be even closer to nature. And although the hill in Ticino soon became an it spot for artists, writers, anarchists and other deviants who were tired of civilization, the founders ultimately failed in their attempt to create a functioning colony out of their ideals. In 1920 the last of them disappeared. In the following decades, an exclusive spa hotel with a recreation park was built on the site of Monte Verità; The complex now belongs to the canton of Ticino, which operates a congress center there together with the ETH Zurich. Today only a few buildings, including a museum, are reminiscent of the visions and experiments of the Monte Verità founders.

The film “Monte Verità – the intoxication of freedom” picks up the summer of 1906 from this long and painful history. Hanna (Maresi Riegner) from Vienna wants to escape her cramped existence as a middle-class wife and mother and follows her doctor Otto Gross (Max Hubacher), who raves about the “most progressive spot on earth”, to Ticino. She reaches Monte Verità, moves into a room in the sanatorium and slowly lets herself into the people in reform clothes, who take light and air baths and dance around the fire in the evening, enraptured. She changes, takes off her strict Viennese wardrobe, devotes herself to photography – in short: frees herself.

She is accompanied – a purely fictional character – on this journey by those people who really shaped the mountain. In addition to the drug addict Otto Gross, a frequent visitor to the sanatorium, and Hermann Hesse (Joel Basman), who took an alcohol withdrawal cure on Monte Verità in 1907 and later settled entirely in Ticino, these are primarily Ida Hofmann (Julia Jentsch) and Lotte Hattemer (great: Hannah Herzsprung). The two women were co-founders of the colony. Hofmann, a women’s rights activist and pianist born in Saxony, ran the sanatorium with her partner Henri Oedenkoven; the Berliner Hattemer was one of those who split off from the group at an early age and lived in the forest.

Open detailed view

All these real fates, the rich history of the mountain are only hinted at by “Monte Verità”; on the other hand, he tells the struggles and turmoil of Hanna in detail and sometimes close to kitsch. “I didn’t want to make a Wikipedia film about Monte Verità,” says Stefan Jäger, the Swiss director. Since he was on the hill for the first time in 1989, he has wanted to tell its story, about this attempt at utopia. Their failure interested him less. “With the imaginary figure Hanna we were able to let the utopia live.”

Above all, Jäger’s film conveys a sensual picture of the events on Monte Verità. In doing so, he is also setting a monument to this piece of world history, but above all to the place with its shimmering light and beguiling landscape. However, it has to be mentioned that none of the mountain scenes were filmed on the mountain itself. This is not surprising, after all, there are hardly any historical buildings left, and anyone who sets out on the hill from Ascona must first fight their way through a terribly ugly settlement until they reach the site of Monte Verità. The shooting therefore took place in a nearby location in the Maggia Valley, where the wild beauty of the region has not yet been built in.

At the center of the film’s often sun-drenched images are the women: next to the protagonist Hanna, the convinced and energetic Ida and the enraptured, death-yearning Lotte. Stefan Jäger and screenwriter Kornelija Naraks succeeded in telling the story of the mountain primarily through this “women’s triangle”, as Jäger calls it. The women’s conversations have to do primarily with them, their needs and considerations, rarely with men. In these moments in particular, “Monte Verità” is as modern as its founders. The film will open regularly in German cinemas in December.