Synopsis   Cast

Die verborgenen Tänze

The Hidden Dances

Switzerland 1983. 16mm, colour, 60 min.
 

A couple of young musicians travel to a village in Upper Valais to meet the Walpen brothers and learn from them a new piece for their repertoire of folk music. Their meeting on the village square in Imfeld develops spontaneously into a party. Old and young leave their houses and start dancing to the «SPillit» on a quickly improvised wooden platform. Between dances they tell each other old tales and legends in which music and the ban on dancing n olden times play a significant part. The theme which constantly recurs is the hidden dances which the wretched, exiled souls are forced to repeat over and over again on the glacier until the Last Judgement and which living musicians are also enticed to play. Reality and fiction become more and more entwined until the festivities on the village square and the secret night of dancing in an isolated mountain cabin become one, and the villagers make their way up to the glacier as exiled souls to await the impending sunrise.

Synopsis   Cast