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For years, Fidelio Films producer Björn Hering wanted to make a film about the tragedy of Swissair Flight 111, which crashed into the Canadian coast of Halifax in 1998.
Hering, the son-in-law of flight pilot Urs Zimmermann, urged his creative partner Mauro Mueller to take on the project, but it took the director a decade to find his way into the story. The result of that breakthrough is “111 – Echoes From Halifax,” playing at the Zurich Film Festival.
The film traces the tragic crash, which took the lives of 229 people on Sept. 2, 1998. The accident is deeply etched into Swiss and Canadian collective memories, with the film addressing how family members struggled to find answers about their loved ones after the crash and how the tragedy forever changed the lives of those living on the coast of Nova Scotia.
Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s premiere in his home country, Swiss-Mexican filmmaker Mueller says he was “moved by how people could offer one another comfort” following the tragedy. “That’s where I found the film: in those unexpected relationships and the resilience people discovered through one another as they tried to find a way forward.”
Having a personal connection with the story increased Mueller’s sense of responsibility. “I was always conscious that people I knew and cared about would eventually sit down and watch what we had made,” he says. “With Björn, there was an ongoing conversation about what felt honest and where we needed to be careful. His closeness to the story was invaluable, but we knew that one family’s experience couldn’t stand for everyone’s. That made it essential to listen just as carefully to people whose experiences were different.”
“The central characters and their stories are fictional,” reiterates the director. “Urs appears briefly in the epilogue as a personal homage, bringing the film back to someone whose life helped set this project in motion.”
Despite the film chronicling a disaster, Mueller refuses to see it as a disaster movie. “We already know how the flight ends,” he says. “I didn’t want to build suspense around whether people would survive when the families watching know that they didn’t.”
“The question that interested me was how you continue living after something like this,” continues the director. “I also wanted to leave room for the contradictions in grief. People laugh, become angry, feel desire, or find themselves unexpectedly close to a stranger. There isn’t one way to experience it, and I wanted the characters to have that freedom rather than asking them to remain solemn throughout.”
This curiosity for the many shapes of grief is translated in the film through magical realism. “Grief can change your experience of time, of a place, of what an ordinary coincidence means to you,” he says. “At certain moments, I wanted the film to enter that subjective experience, to find an image for something the characters couldn’t put into words. I was trying to photograph a feeling.”
Asked about some of the greatest challenges he faced with the film, Mueller brings up the difficulties of “matching the ambition of the film to our resources.” “We had less financing in Canada than we needed for the original plan, which meant moving some of the interior scenes to Switzerland,” he notes.
The director says the schedule was tight and the team had to be “inventive,” especially when it came to locations. Halifax Airport stood in for both Geneva and JFK, and finding a convincing American-style kitchen in Switzerland was another unexpected challenge. “Those are the practical details you don’t necessarily think about when you’re writing.”
“The scenes on the water were particularly demanding, especially at night,” he adds. “We had to recreate the floating wreckage while working on a moving boat, dealing with seasickness and trying to give the actors the space to deliver emotionally truthful performances. Protecting the time and concentration those performances needed, amid all the practical demands, was one of the biggest challenges.”
Shooting in Nova Scotia, where the accident took place, “mattered enormously” to Mueller and his team. “The coastline is beautiful, but once you understand what happened there, you experience it differently. We wanted to capture something of the memory the landscape holds alongside its beauty. Our cinematographer, Claudine Sauvé, brought a remarkable sensitivity to that.”
Swiss programmers and industry experts have called “111 – Echoes From Halifax” “Switzerland’s most anticipated film,” a title Mueller doesn’t take lightly. “It’s humbling, and of course it brings a certain amount of pressure,” he says. “The tragedy remains part of Switzerland’s collective memory, so I understand why people are curious about how a film might approach it. Some will also come with very personal memories and understandable apprehension.”
The screening will be even more poignant since former Swissair pilots will be in the theater. “I’m conscious of what it means to invite them into a cinema to revisit those memories. My hope is that they feel the care with which we approached the story, and that there’s room afterwards to talk.”
“It’s also a special moment for me personally: after directing two features and several shorts abroad, this is my Swiss debut as a feature director,” he adds. “Much of my career has taken place internationally, so bringing this film to audiences at home means a great deal.”
The Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24 – Oct. 4.
