Unrueh (Unrest)

When Peter Kropotkin arrived in the town of Jura in 1872, the Russian was not yet the famous anarchist that he is today's history books. Together with workers from a Swiss watch factory, he discovered that they themselves were like the 'unrueh' (unrest): a tiny but indispensable component (a wheel attached to a spiral) that determines the speed at which a mechanical watch runs. Just before the whole world would move to the same time rhythm, these anarchists were at the controls that would determine the rhythm of life. Although the film by Cyril Schäublin, who grew up in a family of watchmakers, is based on Kropotkin's memoirs, it is not a biographical film. Schäublin himself is too anarchistic for that. He prefers to do away with the rules of cinema to make a more hypnotic film that shows how exploited workers counted down to a world where time is money.

"Unrueh is only writer-director-editor Cyril Schäublin's second film, and already he has established a distinctively offbeat aesthetic. Schäublin's peculiar and playful meditation on anarchy and watchmaking marks him out as a singular new filmmaking talent." - Variety