Hamburger Premiere: Architektur des Glücks

In the organizer's words:

A casino - the largest in Europe - files for bankruptcy and drags an entire village down with it. It's absurd, tragic and enlightening.
Campione d'Italia lies on the shores of Lake Lugano, surrounded by the Swiss canton of Ticino. For almost a hundred years, the exclave has lived exclusively from this casino, both economically and in the self-image of its inhabitants. It was an employer for really every family, and it was glamor and cosmopolitanism, car racing, Sophia Loren, Frederico Fellini. The fur coats, the cars! Their glitter gilded everyone.

But then the casino filed for bankruptcy overnight in 2018. Since then, the municipality has also been bankrupt and its residents are unemployed. Tristesse lies over the alleyways and promenades; above it all, the casino broods as a pointless colossus.

The film undertakes field research in this unique microcosm and finds an ominous mixture of carelessness, self-forgetfulness and loss of reality: a parable of our perseverance in the face of crisis.

Hamburg premiere with director Anton von Bredow and producer Thomas Tielsch as guests.