Swiss drama unmasks the country’s invisible working poor

Based on extensive research into an unseen side of Swiss demographics, ‘A Happy Family’ delves into the question of what it feels like to be poor in one of the world’s richest countries. C-Films AG

In A Happy Family, a single mother who loses her children to the state puts a rare spotlight on poverty in Switzerland. The film left the recent Karlovy Vary film festival with the Best Actress awardExternal link for its lead actress and co-writer, Anna Schinz. 

Switzerland often sparks images of wealth, pristine landscapes and a well-ordered social life, and its cinema has usually managed to keep up appearances. But in A Happy Family, director Jan-Eric Mack turns that picture upside down. 

“We wanted to show a side of Switzerland that is rarely talked about,” Mack says over Zoom, days before departing for Karlovy Vary, where his debut became the first Swiss film ever included in the Czech festival’s “Crystal Globe” competition. The thought-provoking yet entertaining thriller deals with themes of economic precarity and social insecurity in Zurich, one of the richest cities in the world. 

Suspicion creeps in as early as the film’s title, which is too idyllic to be trusted. A telling image then sums up the situation: a woman sitting on the table of a completely burned-out kitchen, a lit cigarette in hand. This is protagonist Niki at her lowest – a single mother of two who works two jobs, fluctuating between days at an industrial laundry and nights in a club cloakroom.  

During one of those night shifts, nine-year-old Leonie accidentally sets the kitchen on fire while making a meal for her younger brother Jimmy. For the authorities, who had already paid a visit due to signs of malnutrition and slipping focus at school, this is the last straw. Despite Niki’s explanations, the children are taken into foster care until her situation is deemed to have improved.

A passion for social topics

Director Mack, who was born in Trüllikon (canton Zurich), came to cinema after embarking upon a career as a graphic designer. “My second big passion next to design was film. As a cinephile, I was always interested in this form of art. Quite late, when I was 26, I decided to become a student again,” he says. 

The short film he made for his master’s degree at the Zurich University of the Arts, Facing Mecca (2017), won a Student Academy Award, and later landed on the Oscars shortlist. “It is a social story about a Syrian Muslim who tries to bury his wife, who died of cancer. Because this is unusual for Switzerland, or for a small village, they have to figure out how to do it,” he says.

“In this village, people are not yet familiar with Muslim burial rites, which raises bureaucratic issues and immediately becomes political,” Mack says. “We felt that ‘measuring death’ was a fitting metaphor for how Swiss asylum policy was handled at the time.”

That success not only raised his profile within the industry; it also framed his signature focus on social topics. TV successes followed, including the hit series Wilder and the spy drama Davos 1917. However, A Happy Family is his proper feature-film debut. Asked what connects Facing Mecca and the new film, he says that it’s a question of dignity. “I’m really interested in the humanistic perspective on life, instead of solely the political one,” Mack says. 

The inconvenient truth

“It took about six years to do the whole film,” Mack adds, tracing the embryo of the idea back to the Covid-19 pandemic, when he started “seeing people queuing up for food, which is an unusual picture for Switzerland. We started to do research because we were surprised by how visible it became that so many people are fighting with poverty”. 

The numbers are startling. “There are about 1.4 million people out of nine million in Switzerland who are affected by poverty or on the edge of it,” Mack says. “Some of those people are so-called ‘working poor’, who have one or more jobs and still can’t handle the average cost of living. We thought this is quite remarkable for one of the richest countries in the world, and yet it remains so pressing and so invisible.” 

In Switzerland’s population of nine million, about 1.4 million are affected by poverty or on the edge of it, like Anna Schinz’s character in ‘A Happy Family’. C-Films AG

The choice of heroine is also deliberate: among the working poor it is single mothers who carry the heaviest load, performing a near-impossible balancing act between childcare and earning a living. Niki is a collective portrait of a systemic inequality which Mack’s team studied meticulously, including by speaking to single mothers affected by poverty. 

However, he adds, it was equally essential to hear the official side and “to find out their views, because they have to make those difficult decisions”. Among others, they consulted with foster care organizations, SOS foster mothers, and other NGOs like Caritas Switzerland. 

The interaction both with individuals and organisations in this field confirmed what Mack sees as a systemic problem. “One of its roots is institutional fragmentation. Due to Switzerland’s federal system, agencies operate differently depending on the specific rules and laws of each canton.” The team also learned that Switzerland ranks near the bottom in Europe for state support of families, with single mothers facing the full brunt of such disadvantages. 

Still, Mack is not wholly pessimistic, believing those troubles can be alleviated. “If society took more responsibility”, he says, “there would be less need for the officials”.

Finding the ambivalence

The lengthy development and research warranted an ample team of four scriptwriters. Alongside Mack there are Nikita Afanasjev and Eva Kienholz, who come from journalism and literature, and Anna Schinz, who had a personal role: “Anna is my wife, so the film lived in our home”, Mack says. 

That said, Schinz did not know from the start that she would end up playing Niki in the film. She “needed to somehow forget everything that happened [during the writing] and be completely free to find the emotional approach” in order to act, Mack says.

An accidental performer: Anna Schinz had no plans to act in the film which she co-wrote; in the end she won the Best Actress award in Karlovy Vary. Karlovy Vary IFF

The Swiss actress pulls it off brilliantly. Her Niki carries grief, sorrow and burden through every impulsive turn, keeping the viewer suspended between sympathy and judgment. The Karlovy Vary jury who awarded Schinz the Best Actress prize said she gaveExternal link a “gripping, hauntingly restrained performance”. 

A sense of ambivalence was in the film’s core from the beginning, Mack explains. “We were convinced we wanted an ambivalent main character. That makes the viewer keep asking themselves: what would I do, and is a moral judgment even possible? It’s more interesting to talk about a topic than to satisfy people with easy answers. This is a super complex situation, and that’s why we didn’t want black-and-white storytelling.” True to reality, no comforting, miraculous solution ever arrives in A Happy Family. 

Between genres

Once the children are placed with a foster family in a remote village, the film shifts into a dense crime drama. Banned from any contact, Niki assumes a new identity to stay close to her children. As she becomes increasingly obsessed with taking back control, the film grows with her, sprouting glimpses of dark comedy and developing its thriller tension with every twist. 

That emotional rollercoaster is rooted in Mack’s understanding of the genre itself. “For me, a drama has some light and dark parts, and humour is also part of life. Even in a super difficult situation, there is immediately something grotesque happening,” he says. The film’s more humorously scripted dialogues and awkward social encounters land without ever devaluing Niki’s dignity. 

Jan-Eric Mack shooting the third season of the Swiss television series ‘Wilder’. Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi

A Happy Family can also be proud of its exquisite visuality, an urbanistic immersion into the less privileged corners of Zurich and its tense custody offices, set against the backdrop of Swiss nature. As well as Zurich, the film was shot in Raron – a small village in mountainous canton Valais – and near Domodossola (Italy). 

What kept it all on course, Mack says, was the atmosphere within the team. “It was important to do cinema, to have complete creative freedom, but also trust and interest of the whole crew. Everybody involved had an influence on this film. As a director I have to lead and hold it together, but I always wanted to stay open to find some treasure on the way.”  

The film will be released in Swiss cinemas in January 2027. 

Edited by Catherine Hickley/dos