The Little SwitzerlandMovies like The Little Switzerland
- Key Features:
- Political satire, Cultural identity, Small town, Historical figure, Quirky characters, Local politics, Nationalism
- Tone:
- whimsical, satirical, witty
- Target Audience:
- Comedy fans, Satire enthusiasts, European cinema viewers
- Emotional Arc:
- Curiosity → Excitement → Absurdity
The Little Switzerland

The discovery of the tomb of William Tell’s son in a town in the Basque Country spurs the village's cantankerous citizens to lobby for Swiss annexation.
The Little Switzerland
The narrative unfolds in the 14th Century, when the European nations vie for supremacy within the Holy Roman Empire. The ambitious Austrian Empire, desiring more land, invades neighbouring Switzerland, a serene and pastoral nation. Protagonist William Tell, a formerly peaceful hunter, finds himself forced to take action as his family and homeland come under threat from the oppressive Austrian King and his ruthless warlords.

A dicey murder investigation. A fuming best friend. A chaotic living situation. Village police officer Franz Eberhofer has a lot on his plate right now.

Cubelles, Tarragona, Spain, Christmas 1985. Five friends make an unexpected discovery in the forest: a woman disguised as Santa Claus trapped in a deep hole dug in the middle of nowhere.

A pastor's faith turns upside down when a meteorite lands in his small Finnish town, its impact stirring up chaos and criminal intentions.

Want to know what a successful day in the life of the little asshole looks like? Yes? Well, after you have successfully disturbed your parents' lovemaking, you concentrate on your own libido. This, slightly disturbed, forces you to strain the weak heart of pensioner Mrs. Koschmidder with unambiguous offers.

Rıfkı, who lives in Germany, returns to his village, which he left years ago, to sell the properties inherited from his late father. A few coincidences that occur upon his arrival in the village lead to his name being associated with the 'Saint' title.

Sibylle, a young Parisian with long teeth, intends to shine in her new job by buying a hardware store in the Basque Country to set up a supermarket. She imagines that she has "rolled" the old owner but the latter is under curatorship. Sibylle must therefore deal with Ramon, the nephew, to recover his money and sign as soon as possible. Otherwise, the ejection seat is assured. She will soon realize that the Basques do not intend to let themselves be made by a Parisian, however pretty she is.

When a judge shuts down a high profile cheese factory for violating pollution standards, the owner bribes a monsignor to fix the problem. After they discover the judge has a predilection for married women, the owner employs a prostitute to pose as his wife in an attempt to seduce the judge.

Rafael, a Seville citizen who has never left the Spanish region of Andalucia, decides to leave his homeland to follow Amaia, a Basque girl unlike other women he has known.

The day after his funeral, the corpse of Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a small Georgian town, turns up in his son's garden. Although it is secretly reburied, the corpse keeps returning until the police capture the local woman who is responsible. This woman says that Varlam should never be laid to rest since his Stalin-like reign of terror led to the disappearance of her family and friends.

Three siblings who detest each other and hiking must complete together a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in order to be eligible to inherit their mother's wealth.

Corrupt and sleazy entrepreneur Cetto La Qualunque comes back to Italy and "jumps into politics" lest his law-abiding opponent, Giovanni De Santis, is elected as mayor.

The residents of an isolated town look to revive their home's identity when a group of foreigners unexpectedly arrive, bringing culture shock with them.

The socialist mayor of a small village in France dreams of building an arts center but he runs up against some opposition.

Don Sallust is the minister of the King of Spain. Being disingenuous, hypocritical, greedy and collecting the taxes for himself, he is hated by the people he oppresses. Accused by The Queen, a beautiful princess Bavarian, of having an illegitimate child to one of her maids of honor, he was stripped of his duties and ordered to retire to a monastery.

Large doses of humor, ingenious nods to Spain's most recent national cinema, an artistic cast highly linked to comedy and a high reserve of surprises constitute the ingredients of this crazy comedy: Spanish Movie.

Amaia after breaking up with Rafa, falls in love with a Catalonian. Koldo, her father, goes to Sevilla to persuade Rafa to go to Catalonia and take Amaia's heart back.

In a small Spanish town, during the Christmas holidays, a group of rich old ladies organize a peculiar event that consists of inviting a homeless person to sit down to dinner at their wealthy table. Plácido, a humble worker, is hired by the organizers to participate in a parade with his three-wheeled vehicle, a seemingly simple mission that will not be easy for him to accomplish.

The Tucci family discovers that they have not really lost all their money and, refusing to pay Italian taxes, decides to turn Torresecca into a tax haven, relying on a post-Italian unification bureaucratic oversight.

A film set in the Spanish side of the Basque Country, beginning in the Carlist war of 1875 and ending during the Spanish Civil war of 1936. The film portrays how one single act of cowardice shapes the life of the next three generations of two families and fuels the intense rivalry which will span the next sixty-one years.

When a young diplomat manages to get the Austrian government to return the Plume of Moctezuma to Mexico for an exhibition, his life quickly falls apart.

A policeman suspects that several bizarre deaths in the same family were murders and that the killer is a mysterious woman who just moved to the village.

Burdened by troubles and caught between cultures, Riza takes a job as a mall Santa and finds that real life may not be so different from make believe.

To save his crumbling and rapidly-depopulating rural town, its mayor fakes a gruesome murder to attract media attention. His plan initially succeeds, but soon the situation will spiral out of control.

The family dinner at Stephan and Elisabeth could have been wonderful. But when Thomas announces that he and his pregnant girlfriend Anna are going to call their son Adolf, the hosts and the family friend René are stuck in the throat.

David, a young farmer from Cantal, has just had an idea: to save his farm from bankruptcy, he is going to set up a cabaret on the farm. The show will be on stage and on the plate, with good local products. He is sure, it can only work. His relatives, his mother and especially his grandfather, are more skeptical.

Nicolas has a happy existence, parents who love him, a great group of friends with whom he has great fun, and all he wants is that nothing changes. However, one day, he overhears a conversation that leads him to believe that his life might change forever, his mother is pregnant! He panics and envisions the worst.

In 1614 a Japanese expedition led by the emperor's grandson landed in the Sevillian town of Coria del Río, and the heir to the throne fell in love with a beautiful Sevillian, formed a family and never returned to Japan. 400 years later, Emperor Satohito dies and the rightful heir turns out to be Paco Japan, a 37-year-old neighbor of Coria del Río. The life of Paco and his family will change dramatically when he sees himself overnight living in the Imperial Palace and preparing to be the new Emperors of Japan. The cultural and linguistic clash between Japanese and Andalusian will cause funny and crazy situations in this adventure where East and West shake hands.

Costi is a family man whose cash-strapped neighbor makes him an intriguing proposition: help him find the fortune reportedly buried somewhere on the grounds of his family’s country home in Romania and split the profits.

Between her roles as mayor and teacher in the small village of Kerguen, Alice's days are very full. When an unexpected new student, 60-year-old Emile, finally decides to learn to read and write, her daily life threatens to become unmanageable. Especially since Alice will also have to save her village and her school...

Alone on a tiny deserted island, Hank has given up all hope of ever making it home again. But one day everything changes when a dead body washes ashore, and he soon realizes it may be his last opportunity to escape certain death. Armed with his new “friend” and an unusual bag of tricks, the duo go on an epic adventure to bring Hank back to the woman of his dreams.

Set on the small island of Porto Buio, the traditional live Christmas Nativity scene might not go ahead because the baby who’s always played Jesus has grown up and no new babies have been born on the island in years! With this fundamental tradition on the line, newly elected Mayor Cecco (Claudio Bisio) wants to ask the local Tunisian community to “borrow” one of their children, but there’s conflict between the two communities. Cecco enlists the help of local Islam convert Bilal (Alessandro Gassman) to cross the cultural divide… but both communities are not sure what to make of a baby Jesus that may need his nationality, and even his religion changed!

In a dystopian Switzerland that has fallen under the fascist rule of an evil cheese tyrant, Swiss mountain girl Heidi transforms herself into a kick-ass female fighting force who sets out to liberate the country from a cheese-fueled machinery of hate.

Stig-Helmer takes another vacation with his norwegian friend Ole. This time it's time for a skiing vacation in the Alps. Of course, Stig-Helmer has never learnt downhill skiing, but he attends a ski school. And together they manage to charm two women also on vacation.

After 15 years, Tomas, a not very succesfull writer, comes back to the village in Galicia where his family comes from, Arga, apparently to get an award. But he doesn't know the real reason why he is there, to end with an old curse that is been haunting the village for the last hundred years.

A small Spanish town, Villar del Río, is alerted to the upcoming visit of American diplomats and its ruling townsmen begin preparations to impress the American visitors, in the hopes of benefiting under the Marshall Plan. Hoping to demonstrate the side of Spanish culture with which the visiting foreign officials would be more familiarized, the Castilian citizens don unfamiliar Andalusian costumes, hire a renowned flamenco performer, and re-decorate their town in Andalusian style, meantime waiting for their uncertain arrival.

Agent Jesus Juarez (aka Chucho) has always played the Devil in his town's Nativity Play. This Christmas, when the new pastor of the church recasts the role, the two men engage in a battle between good and evil.

A group of Serbian socialists prepares for the war in a surreal underground filled by parties, tragedies, love and hate.

A bright young yeti finds something he thought didn't exist—a human. News of this “smallfoot” throws the simple yeti community into an uproar over what else might be out there in the big world beyond their snowy village.

The film depicts a world in which Atatürk never became leader, the War of Independence never took place, and the Ottoman Republic continues to exist in a form adapted to the present day. The continuation of the Ottoman Republic instead of the Republic of Turkey, Ankara not being the capital, signs and license plates being in both Turkish and Arabic, and the sultan wearing a suit under his caftan are some of the tragicomic situations that make up the film's story.

In a small village of Communist-era Romania a young couple wish to marry, but Joseph Stalin dies the night prior to their wedding ceremony forcing the bride and groom to marry in silence.

When American author Nicholas brings in a cosmetologist named Kika to prepare the corpse of his recently deceased son, she inadvertently revives the young man, then falls in love with him. Forces conspire against the couple, though, as Nicholas wants Kika for himself.

A woman recalls her childhood growing up in the North of Spain, focusing on her relationship with her father.

In a village of the Po valley where the earth is hard and life miserly, the priest and the communist mayor are always fighting to be the head of the community. If in secret, they admired and liked each other, politics still divided them as it is dividing the country. And when the mayor wants his "People's House"; the priest wants his "Garden City" for the poor. Division exist between the richest and the poorest, the pious and the atheists and even between lovers. But if the people are hard as the country, they are good in the bottom of there heart.

In 18th-century Rome, impish aristocrat Onofrio del Grillo amuses himself by playing pranks on all sorts of people — his reactionary family and fellow nobles, the poors, the French occupiers trying to modernize society, and even the Pope himself.

Having fought in the First Carlist War, Martin returns to his family farm in Gipuzkoa only to find that his younger brother, Joaquín, towers over him in height. Convinced that everyone will want to pay to see the tallest man on Earth, the siblings set out on a long trip all over Europe, during which ambition, money and fame will forever change the family’s fate. A story based on true events.

Don Anselmo, a retired old man, decides to buy a motorized disabled stroller since all his pensioner friends own one. His family strongly refuses him to purchase the vehicle, so don Anselmo decides to take extreme measures to achieve his goal…

Late 19th century in Alexandria. Two traditionally rival Turkish families, "Seferoglu"s and "Tellioglu"s are competing for the "Green Valley". The winner will be determined by Daver Bey, who has a beautiful young daughter, Leyla. Both families try to arrange a marriage between a man from their family and Leyla, so that Daver Bey will be inclined to give the green valley to his "relatives". Tellioglus, who are behind in the race, desperately find a final solution: They will fake their idiotic butler, Saban, as the highest ranked Ottoman soldier in Egypt: Tosun Pasha.

Gary, who has just married Samantha, the woman of his dreams, discovers that her six-year-old son may be the Antichrist.

Basque Country, Spain, 1843. A police constable arrives at a small village in Álava to investigate a mysterious blacksmith who lives alone deep in the woods.

Serafino, a young and innocent shepherd, inherits a huge fortune. He immediately starts spending the entire sum on presents for his friends, causing the envy of his family.

Mukhtar Yusuf Ağa’s unregistered village in eastern Anatolia has been championed through letters to government officials, and his lost son İbrahim, rescued and registered by Father Hana, is finally returning at age 30 with his American love Jessica; the question is whether Tinne can become their true homeland.

Don Camillo (now bishop) and Peppone (now senator) return to the town of Brescello and rekindle their friendly rivalry.

Garfagnana, Italy, 1347. The handsome servant Masseto, fleeing from his vindictive master, takes shelter in a nunnery where three young nuns, Sister Alessandra, Sister Ginevra and Sister Fernanda, try unsuccessfully to find out what their purpose in life is, a conundrum that each of them faces in different ways.

A much-needed boost, in the form of a new factory, is promised to the residents of the tiny fishing village St. Marie-La-Mauderne, provided they can lure a doctor to take up full-time residency on the island. Inspired, the villagers devise a scheme to make Dr. Christopher Lewis a local.

Believe it or not, even Smalltown USA still has people who are unfulfilled and unrelieved in the midst of plenty. Levonna and Lamar could have the perfect relationship, were it not for Lamar's obsession with rear entry.

This coarse bedroom farce takes place at the St. Moritz ski resort over a Christmas vacation. Among the couples whose lives intersect are a widowed artist honeymooning with his second wife, a gay man traveling with his son and his lover (and hiding each from the other), a snobbish couple from Milan who have been forced to share a suite with a pair of crass Romans, etc.

Fúsi finds comfort in the familiarity of his routines, until an involuntary dance class forces him to encounter the real world.

In order to wipe out the Gaulish village by any means necessary, Caesar plans to absorb the villagers into Roman culture by having an estate built next to the village to start a new Roman colony.

Tom loves Sophie and Sophie loves Tom. But Tom and Sophie are of differering classes. Can they find a way through the mayhem to be true to love?

Wojnar is a wealthy man who is marrying off his beautiful daughter Kasia, in a small town in present day Poland. Wojnar had to bribe the groom with a fancy car, since Kasia was pregnant by another man. At the end of the ceremony, the car is delivered by a gangster, who immediately demands the promised money and the deed to land from Kasia's grandfather. Unfortunately grandpa is unwilling to let go of the land. Meanwhile each of the workers at the reception demand to be paid, so Wojnar, who is very reluctant to part with his money, tries to haggle and bribe his way out of all the situations.

A hapless hunchback who only yearns for love, finds himself in the middle of a murderous feud between the Pope and the King of France when each orders the hunchback to kill the other.

In the peaceful world of Little Nicholas, there is Daddy, Mommy, the school, but above all, his band of friends. They are called The Invincibles, but above all they are inseparable. At least they think so. But when Dad gets a promotion and announces that the family is moving to the south of France, Nicolas' world falls apart. How can he imagine life without his best friends?

Leandro, an unemployed mason and his friend, Tocho, attempt to rob a tobacconist in the Vallecas district of Madrid, but Mrs. Justa, the tobacconist, impedes it alerting the neighbors who notify police. Inside the shop, the confrontation between the two friends and their 'hostages', the tobacconist and her niece Angeles, is relaxing, and a budding sympathy arises between them.

A middle-aged government accountant is determined to secure a stable job for his son before retiring, willing to go to great lengths to achieve his goal.

Western Pyrenees, year 778. When his land is threatened by the ruthless armies of the Frankish emperor, a Basque warlord asks for help from his ancestral gods.

At the Mêle sur Sarthe, a small Norman village, farmers are affected by a crisis. Georges Balbuzard, the mayor of the city, is not one to let them down and decides to try everything to save his village...

Cantinflas is a unique barber, who trades with an elderly neighbor, a lawyer by profession, laws lessons in exchange for haircuts and shaved. It proposes advice to defend in court the disadvantaged neighborhood. His success deputy seeks the votes as the other candidate, Don Próculo, it is not accepted by anyone but his own bodyguards. Don Próculo will use know how much ruse to win the election by the Council, and also for the love of 'Sarita'

The king of a secret modern-time Medieval kingdom leaves his throne in inheritance to his son, who struggles to lead the kingdom in fight for its independence from the Italian state.

The Bouvier-Sauvages, a large aristocratic family, meet the much more modest Martin family when their children's wedding is announced. For the occasion, the future bride and groom offer their parents DNA tests, which will reveal their true origins. The results are totally unexpected and will make the effect of a bomb.

Set in France at the end of World War II Albert Dehousse finds out his father wasn't a war hero and his mother is a collaborator.

Guner Sernikli is a government official who, with his wife and their wheelchair bound daughter, has been assigned as the head librarian to this isolated province, virtually an exile since there is no library in the village. The family is warmly welcome, but these are the years of political anarchy and leftist/rightist clashes in big cities and the youth of the village inevitably follow the tides. They arrive in Vizontele, just as the situation is becoming really absurd. Guner brings wisdom; his daughter Tuba brings beauty, innocence and love. Some like the Mayor, Nazmi Dogan and crazy Emin appreciate these things but they are in the minority and confusion continues to reign. The story is based on the memories of writer-director Yılmaz Erdoğan of the last summer of his childhood in Hakkâri, Turkey in 1980.

An isolated house, a young couple, a perverted videographer, a mute. All of which leads to normal activities... but not quite! A parody of Paranormal Activity.

Xate is an ordinary woman from Midyat with eight children in tow. The only thing that sets her apart is her husband's job as Mayor of Midyat. Until, that is, an extraordinary day changes her life - and the lives of everyone else in Midyat. For the illiterate, uneducated Xate becomes Mayor of Midyat! While she takes on her mayoral duties much as she does those in her house, the infantile rivalry between her children in municipal matters leads to adventures that have the Midyat folk howling with laughter.

The Milanese Donato returns from Spain, animated by the serious intention to go back to being the "ras della fossa". Second chapter of the famous 80s cult.

Energetic priest Don Camillo returns to the town of Brescello for more political and personal duels with Communist mayor Peppone.

In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon.

The story takes place in the small town of Hakkari in Turkey at the beginning of the '70s. The time has come to bring technology to that small town. The first Television (called Visiontele by the citizens) arrives and the chaos begins.

Biblical archaeologist Don Verdean is hired by a local church pastor to find faith-promoting relics in the Holy Land. But after a fruitless expedition he is forced to get creative in this comedy of faith and fraud.

During the Spanish Civil War, sworn enemies must work together when they encounter flesh-eating zombies created in a Nazi experiment.

After his grandfather's death, a man travels with his wife and kids to his hometown, where chaos ensues with his relatives over the inheritance.

Jean has been the conservative mayor of a small town for several years. He intends to run for another term. Edith, his wife, is the paragon of the traditional devoted housewife and mother. So it comes as quite a shock when she tells her husband of forty years that deep down, she has always been... A MAN! Totally blindsided, Jean didn't see this coming. For a politician campaigning on family values, this is too much! But Edith, still the loving wife, make a deal with him: she will postpone her transition and stay a woman until after the elections. But as we know, campaigns are all about digging up dirt to keep the rumor mill turning

A catholic French couple sees their life upside down when their four daughters get married to men of different religion and origins.

An ultraconservative family father must spend a weekend with his dysfunctional children for the burial of his wife.

When the naked body of a teenage girl is found on the banks of the River Baztán, it is quickly linked to a similar murder one month before. Soon, rumours are flying in the nearby village of Elizondo. Is this the work of a ritualistic killer or is it the basajaun, the ‘invisible guardian’ of Basque mythology? Inspector Amaia Salazar leads the investigation, taking her back to the heart of the Basque country where she was born, and where she hoped never to return. Shrouded in mist and surrounded by impenetrable forests, it is a place of unresolved conflicts and a terrible secret from Amaia’s childhood that will come back to haunt her. Faced with the superstitions of the village, Amaia must fight the demons of her past to confront the reality of a serial killer on the loose. But as she is drawn deeper into the investigation, she feels the presence of something darker lurking in the shadows…

Priest Don Camillo blackmails his friendly rival Peppone into letting him join a Communist delegation visiting the Soviet Union.

Santi, a young high-school student with a serious physical reaction to sunlight, is forced by his health to move with his single mother to a shadowy, isolated village in the mountains of Spain where the inhabitants begin to reveal themselves as strangely xenophobic. When terrible, violent events begin to occur, Santi becomes first a pariah at school and then strongly suspected by the police of hideous murders. Santi himself, however, wonders if he is not the next victim.

When her social-climbing father is relocated from small-town North to his native Rome, 12-year-old Caterina enrolls to his old school, finding herself at sea with an environment where students sort themselves by social class and their parents' political affiliation.

Amaia has just become a mother, and the challenge is even more significant than she imagined. So when her partner has to leave for several weeks because of his job, she decides to spend time with her parents in a lovely coastal village in the Basque Country and hopefully share the responsibility of looking after her baby. However, she forgot that even when one becomes a parent, one never stops being a daughter.

Unable to find her runaway son, a woman deceives two of her ex-lovers from her youth, a mild-mannered teacher and a tough journalist, that each is the real father in order to obtain their help.

Jojo, a lonely German boy during World War II has his world shaken when he learns that his single mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their home. Influenced by a buffoonish imaginary version of Adolf Hitler, he begins to question his beliefs and confront the conflict between propaganda and his own humanity.

Anna and Thomas want to get married in the South Tyrolean Alps. However, Stephan's daughter Antigone and the family clan bring so much chaos to the planned idyll that it's not just the wedding that is on the rocks.

Twelve-year-old Noura dangles uncertainly in that difficult netherworld between childhood and adulthood. His growing libido has gotten him banned from the women's baths, where his mother took him when he was younger, but he's not yet old enough to participate in grown-up discussions with the men of his Tunisian village. Noura's only real friend is a troublemaker named Salih -- the village political outcast.

Pauline, a devoted and generous home help nurse, raises her two children alone, while also looking after her father, a former steelworker. Taking advantage of her popularity, the directors of an extremist political party suggest she become their candidate at the mayoral elections.

On his deathbed, a powerful Mafia boss names his estranged son heir to his criminal empire: however, his men discover too late that the son at issue is an idiotic manchild.

Everyone knows that being a teenager is not easy, especially when you are a demigod with unlimited powers and risking being crucified at any moment, this is the life of Jesus Christ in his new school.

Eugene, a young nobleman, asks two penniless idlers to impersonate his noble relatives to help him marry Gemma, the daughter of an enriched cook.


