Lucienne Lanaz

Lucienne Lanaz was born in 1937 in Zürich. She grew up in Zürich and lives and works in a farmhouse in Grandval in the Bernese Jura. Her various training as a commercial clerk and sports teacher and her work as a secretary at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and as a simultaneous translator at film festivals kept her on the move. From 1972 she worked as an assistant in Swiss film productions. In 1974, she worked with Marcel Leiser on the documentary Le Bonheur à septante ans (Late Happiness), and with her first documentary Fire, Smoke, Sausages (The Smoking Kitchen, 1976), she became an independent director and producer. She founded her own production company, Jura-Films, in order to release her films herself. Because the situation for female filmmakers was catastrophic, a number of female filmmakers, including Isa Hesse, Greti Kläy, Isolde Marxer and Tula Roy, got together and founded the association CH-Filmfrauen in 1975, which was active until the end of the 1980s. A text by Lucienne Lanaz about the women's film festival in Sorrento around 1977 describes the situation in the 1980s and 1990s:

Lucienne Lanaz, March 1995

In 1979/80, co-directed with Anne Cuneo, Erich Liebi and Urs Bolliger, she published the 75-minute humorous documentary on the Swiss film newsreel Ciné-journal au féminin (The Image of Women in the Swiss Film Newsreel), a research project to examine this medium for representations of women. Out of 9000 contributions, 300 were also about women and 12 were only about women. From the 1940s until 1975, the Schweizer Filmwochenschau broadcast current information in the cinema before the main film, which was intended to inform objectively and strengthen the independent spirit.

Lanaz has been an honorary member of the Swiss Association of Film Directors, a member of the Swiss Cinema Society Committee for 5 years, a member of the Photo, Cinema and Video Commission of the Canton of Bern for 8 years and an active member of the Alpinale-Vorarlberg, Austria film working group for 15 years.

Lanaz has worked at various international festivals. She was president, European commissioner, festival coordinator and member of the international jury of the Bludenz Festival (1990, 1993, 1997) and member of the international jury of the Bilbao (1978), Imola (1996), San Giovanni Lupatoto (1997), Oberhausen (2001) and Leeds (2001) festivals. In 2008, she gave film readings at the Freiburg School of Social Work as part of the Freiburg International Film Festival.

• 1989: International Jury Prize at the Visual Anthropology Festival in Pärnu, Estonia, for Feu, fumée, saucisse

• 2003: Silver Bear at the Festival of Nations in Ebensee, Austria, for Nous déclinons toute responsabilité...

• 2009: Award for best documentary at the Festival de Cine in Granada, Spain, for Nous déclinons toute responsabilité...

• 2016: One of the 12 prizes of the Fondation Créativité au Troisième Age for L'enfance retrouvée

• 1995: Grand Prix of the San Gio' Video Festival for her complete works

• 2017: Art, Literature and Science Prize of the Conseil du Jura bernois (CJB) for her life's work

• 2023: Bern Film Prize - special prize for her life's work and her many years of tireless commitment as an author, director and producer