The Circle (2014)

Original title

Der Kreis

Directed by

Stefan Haupt

Genre

drama film, romance film, LGBTQ-related film

Country

Switzerland

Runtime

1h 42m

Rated

16

Rating

6.5 of 10 from 41 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

The film tells the true story of a schoolteacher and a drag performer who meet in 1950s Zurich through a gay publication called The Circle. Their romance develops as police crack down on the city's gay scene after a series of murders.

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What happens

The Circle (German: Der Kreis) is a 2014 Swiss docudrama film. Written and directed by Stefan Haupt, the film concerns the social network of gay men that developed in Zürich in the 1940s and 1950s, centered on The Circle, a gay publication, and the social events it sponsored. As the police investigate three murders of gay men by rent boys, they scapegoat The Circle and its subscribers for making Zürich an international center of gay tourism. The film focuses on the story of Ernst Ostertag and Röbi Rapp, a schoolteacher and a drag entertainer, who met through their participation in the publication inner circle and began a lifelong romantic relationship. Interviews with them and other survivors and experts on the era are interspersed with documentary film and photographs as well as a scripted dramatic enactment of the story. The lack of legal proscription against homosexuals and Zürich's growing notoriety provide the context for the growth of a publication that overtly catered to a gay readership while avoiding explicit materials, both in prose and illustrations, in order to meet the standards of Swiss censorship. The couple are portrayed by Matthias Hungerbühler and Sven Schelker, with documentary interviews with the real Ostertag and Rapp. The Circle was selected as the Swiss entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards, but was not nominated. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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