“The Legacy of Bruno Stefanini”, by director Thomas Haemmerli, will be screened at the opening of the Solothurn Film Festival on January 22. The film humorously combines recent history and the life of Bruno Stefanini, son of an Italian immigrant who became a billionaire entrepreneur.
People, protected from head to toe as in a laboratory dealing with pathogenic bacteria, sort objects in a hangar. These are the first images from the documentary, which will be released in March in German-speaking cinemas. “It’s to fight against mold,” explains director Thomas Haemmerli, who traveled from Zurich to Bern for an interview with Keystone-ATS.
These people are sifting through the 100,000 collectibles, from top-notch art to bric-a-brac, that Bruno Stefanini left behind when he died in 2018, at the age of 94, after a long illness. Added to this heritage are 2,200 apartments, castles and the Sulzer Tower in Winterthur.
Prohibition of cohabitation
Beyond the real estate magnate’s journey, this documentary highlights his biography in the context of the Cold War or the ban on cohabitation. In Zurich in 1972, for example, a couple who were not married could not live together, according to the law.
This is not the case in some municipalities in Aargau, the neighboring canton. Bruno Stefanini, who manufactured housing for a booming Switzerland in the 1960s, was sensitive to social developments. He built multi-story buildings there, with one or two-room housing, intended for a new population: cohabiting couples and women, who were discovering economic independence.
A ladies’ man
On a more personal level, Bruno Stefanini is a man of his time. In the film, his wife and one of his first girlfriends speak, painting the portrait of him as a man who refused to conquer anything. His secretary, at his side for 63 years and who will accompany him until the end, plays the role of the woman in the shadows, his factotum.
He was a charmer, a charismatic personality, a successful entrepreneur and a bon vivant who loved drinking and partying. “We found the correspondence he maintained with his ‘friends’ throughout his life,” noted the filmmaker, emphasizing the complexity of the relationships.
Dispute with Christoph Blocher
Quickly a billionaire, he nevertheless allowed his real estate to deteriorate and the term “Stefanini house” became established in Winterthur. Former federal councilor and collector Christoph Blocher argued with him over the withdrawal of the security deposit for an apartment rented at the time by the woman who would become his wife. A few years later, the two men bought works by Albert Anker together at auction.
-“I don’t know if Bruno Stefanini and Christoph Blocher were friends, rather acquaintances, who had a pronounced taste for patriotism and history,” said Thomas Haemmerli, a former squatter, journalist and correspondent in Paris for the SRF, in previous lives.
Another ambition
In the documentary, we see Bruno Stefanini arguing with young people who defended a Switzerland without an army or squatters. Arriving at the top, the billionaire turns to another ambition.
He wanted to create a museum or a collection, which “would be an encyclopedia of the cultural history of the West, for uncultured people, based on objects, memories”, says Elisabeth Grossmann in the film, historian of the West. art, former director of the Konkret collection, who took care of the collection on the end of Bruno Stefanini’s life.
Diogenes Syndrome
The case of a maniacal collector with practically unlimited means fascinated Thomas Haemmerli. This former Zurich activist, now a political communicator and filmmaker, is known for his documentary films “Die Gentrifizierung bin ich” (I am gentrification), where the former squatter turns into an owner, and “Sieben Mulden und eine Leiche” ( Seven dumpsters and a corpse) on his mother, who suffered from Diogenes syndrome, that of pathological hoarders. In the last years of his life, the billionaire also seems to have suffered from this disease.
Today, Bettina Stefanini, Bruno’s daughter, runs the multi-billion foundation and manages both the houses and the works of art. Currently installed in the Sulzer tower and its cellars in Winterthur, the foundation will move. The time has come for the renovation of houses while the objects, the inventory of which has not been completed, are made available to the thousand museums in Switzerland.
When Thomas Haemmerli, 60, left journalism at the time of the digital explosion around 2000, he spent a week binge-watching documentary films at the “Visions du Réel” festival in Nyon. “In an hour and a half, we can still say something reasonable on a subject,” he concluded.
Solothurn has chosen to open its next edition with this documentary on the Winterthur tycoon. “The question ‘what will we leave to our posterity?’ is relevant in the context of the 60th edition of the Solothurn Days”, noted the new spokesperson for the Festival Emma Insolini.
This article was automatically published. Source: ats
Related News :