27/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: The Swiss director breaks down her upcoming film, which won the Eurimages Co-production Development Award at the Berlinale Co-Production Market

Swiss writer-director Andrea Štaka spoke to Cineuropa after winning the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award for her project IBICABA – Visions of Paradise at the recent Berlinale Co-Production Market (see the news). The accolade is accompanied by a €20,000 cash prize. The project is a Swiss production, produced by Michela Pini and Olga Lamontanara for Cinédokké, along with Štaka’s Okofilm Productions.

Cineuropa: What is the story behind IBICABA – Visions of Paradise, and what inspired you to adapt a novel into a film? Could you share some insights into how you developed your main character and the research process that helped bring her story to life?
Andrea Štaka: IBICABA – Visions of Paradise tells the story of a working-class woman in the 1850s. It’s an adaptation of a Swiss novel by Evelyne Hasler with the same title, about a group of Swiss settlers looking for a new life in Brazil. There is an important minor character in the novel called Barbara Simmen and I realised that I would like to make her my protagonist and to tell her story. I started looking in archives to do research on female everyday life, letters, notes, anecdotes. In Glarus, Switzerland, where the story starts out, many women in those days worked in textile factories but I found practically nothing about working-class women or textile factory workers. They were blanked out; they had no history. It was hard to believe. And of course, there was absolutely nothing personal, nothing about health, pregnancy, intimacy, desires, etc. There was only one document about Barbara Simmen: her birth certificate.

I was intrigued and did lots and lots of research in order to re-create Barbara Simmen’s possible biography, looking for her traces, speaking to historians, factory workers, village elders in Switzerland today. Slowly, her life began to materialise. Traveling to Brazil with her and “her” story, I charted new territory that is not elaborated in the novel:  the Swiss were confronted with a completely different culture and an ambivalent, entangled society of Portuguese landlords, German settlers and enslaved workers. The novel was written in 1985 when our colonialist past was not yet a subject of debate, rethinking and reevaluation. It is vital for us to confront these issues, today more than ever. I have contact with a great Brazilian historian who knows a lot about women in the São Paulo area at that time. She had to do an awful lot of research too to try to reconstruct a past that has been ignored by official channels, to find stories, realities, the spirit of the enslaved women in archives. The ending in my film is completely different from the novel, since I give voice to two invisible women at the end. For me it was important to recreate a kind of reality, an image of how it might have been. In a way, it is not an invented story. As Saidiya Hartman puts it, it’s a critical fabulation.

I want to shoot the film with a team I know, a small crew. We are already working on the locations, production design, costumes, all in a spirit of reduction. I’d love to shoot on 16mm film. Let’s see if we can.

What stage is your project currently in, and what are your next steps in terms of financing, script development, and casting?
Together with Michela Pini and Olga Lamontanara we are starting to look for the big money now. As the story takes place in Switzerland and Brazil, we are aiming for a co-production between those two countries and a third one. I am steadily working on the script. It’s come a long way and we have started with the casting process. I love spending time on locations, for the moment it’s the Swiss canton of Glarus, where the first half of the film takes place, with its factories, mountains, forest, lots of shadow, old machines and a hard-working rural society faced with famine if crops failed.

How would you describe your experience at this year’s Berlinale Co-Production Market?
It was fruitful. We met old and new partners but also people who have been connected with the project for a while (TV, sales, producers). And the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award made us proud and ready to rock!

How do you plan to make the most of the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, especially considering the challenges of creating a period film?
It’s a challenge to shoot a period film - set in the 19th century - with a European arthouse budget. In order for the Heads of Departments to prepare well and find creative solutions, we will start working even earlier to give shape to the visual style, so parts of the budget will be used for that work and for longer sessions, almost workshop-like, all together. It’s a beautiful aspect of the process and great that we can pay salaries for it.

What is your anticipated timeline for the production of film, and when do you hope to have the film completed?
As a director I would love to shoot in a year and have the film ready beginning of 2027. Let’s see!