‘Reinas’ lands top Swiss film prize for 2025

Swiss-Peruvian director Klaudia Reynicke picking up the quartz prize in Geneva on Friday. Keystone-SDA

Reinas (Queens), directed by Klaudia Reynicke, was named as the best feature of the year at the 2025 Swiss Film Awards in Geneva on Friday evening.

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In December, Reinas fell out of the running for best international feature at the Oscars. However, the coming-of-age drama has now won the prize of best feature at the Swiss Film Awards.

The film tells the story of two girls who move with their mother from Lima to the US during a period of political unrest in Peru in the early 1990s, leaving the largely absent father behind.

Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke, who lives in Lugano, drew on her own biography for the film.

In another major category at the awards, Simon Baumann’s Wir Erben was unsurprisingly named as best documentary film of the year. In the film, Baumann, whose previous works include Image Problem (2012) and Zum Beispiel Suberg (2013) talks to his parents about a farm they want to leave to their children. The film is a discussion about money, desires and expectations.

Two best actors

Meanwhile both David Constantin and Dimitri Krebs went home with the award for best actor. Two winners in the same category is rare, but it can occur when the nominees receive the same number of votes from the Swiss Film Academy.

Constantin was honoured for his role as daredevil policeman Bax in the successful crime comedy Tschugger – Der lätscht Fall. Dimitri Krebs was honoured for his performance in Landesverräter, where he plays Ernst Schrämli, a young man from St Gallen who was executed for treason during the Second World War.

The award for best actress went to Laetita Dosch. In the tragicomic feature Le procès du chien, for which she co-wrote the screenplay and made her directorial debut, she also plays lawyer Avril – who takes the case of a dog in order to prevent it being put to sleep.

Translated from German by DeepL/dos

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