Swiss-Mexican director Mauro Mueller’s “111 – Echoes From Halifax,” playing at the Zurich Film Festival, revisits Swissair Flight 111’s Sept. 2, 1998, crash, which killed 229 people, through families’ grief and unexpected bonds rather than suspense over survival.
Mueller says the film’s central characters and stories are fictional; Urs Zimmermann appears briefly in the epilogue as a personal homage. The film uses magical realism to portray grief’s subjective effects. Mueller said he was careful not to present one family’s experience as everyone’s.
The Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24–Oct. 4. Mueller said the production had less Canadian financing than planned, so some interior scenes were moved to Switzerland; Halifax Airport stood in for both Geneva and JFK.
