Wir Bergler in den Bergen sind eigentlich nicht schuld, dass wir da sind

(Don't blame us mountaineers for living in the mountains)
by Fredi M. Murer
108', 35mm, Swiss, 1974

In 1974, a 108-minute long work carried the long and proverbial German title Wir Bergler in den Bergen sind eigentlich nicht schuld, dass wir da sind, loosely translated in English as “It’s not the mountaineers’ fault if they’re from the mountains”. The director’s original idea was to bring five legends of Uri, a Swiss canton, into the modern day. Yet, after months of research, Murer was forced to admit that the old myths and legends had disappeared. He thus transformed his conversations with the people of Uri into a reflection upon the problems of industrialization, mountain depopulation, and the transformation of mountain shepards into those people who no longer worked the land. The film, with its significant political and moral overtones, allowed Murer and his non-conformist outlook to approach the kind of people that we se in his earlier works mountain residents living at the margins of society, like Indians on their reservations.