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Has Julian moved out yet?

The Canadian harpsichord maker lived and worked under these roofs.

We used to bump into each other at the old station

but never spoke for more than two minutes.

He used to greet me with a big smile.

But...

I was always in such a hurry on my bicycle.

I promised I'd come to visit him.

But then there was the decision to demolish the old station

and I am left waiting in vain outside his workshop.

Julian has let his last deadline pass and returned to Canada.

Today Julian lives under a bridge and nurses a baby pigeon.

Guess whats hidden in that copper box?

It's a time capsule

to pass selected objects on to future generations.

Today we celebrate the start of the Prison and Police Centre.

And tomorrow our great-grandchildren might dig up

a well-preserved cobblestone of the old freight station.

I wonder if someone is troubled by a guilty conscience?

Not really.

The police chief threw a pair of handcuffs into the time capsule.

And then the chief of justice chucked in a mirror, saying:

"Whoever has power must check herself now and again in the mirror."

On a sticky July night in 1896

just before this station was built

an Alsatian scissor grinder named Alois Remetter

went through the pubs of my neighbourhood.

He came across a group of Italian construction workers.

Without warning, he knocked two Italians to the ground with his stick.

One lost his teeth, the other got a kicking.

When Remetter tried to bring his stick on a third Italian head

the 31-year-old bricklayer named Giovanni Brescianini

pulled out a kitchen knife and shoved it into Remetter's stomach.

News of the scissor grinder's death spread like wildfire across the city.

600 Swiss and German workers ganged up

to put an end to "bloodthirsty Italians".

From numerous windows

the contents of chamber pots rained down on them.

The riot continued in the morning.

More and more curious people and Italian haters from the better quarters of the city

now came to the worker's neighbourhood.

Italian workers fled in droves.

About a thousand hid in the woods

and hundreds ran to the hills.

They lit campfires and set guards to protect themselves from further attacks.

And many ran to the station

to take the next train south.

I make a New Year's resolution:

I will not allow my past to be destroyed.

The past never dies.

It's not even past.

My grandmother went to a factory after primary school.

She worked as a winder at Brown & Boveri

who electrified our railways.

She had to gobble down her lunch so quickly

that later she suffered a stomach ulcer.

My grandfather was a carpenter but became unemployed in the 1930s.

He came looking for work and found grandmother instead.

Both came from peasant families.

We were all peasants in Switzerland

until the railway made our country a flourishing market place.

When my grandfather had to give up his carpentry business

he had a heart attack.

But he continued carpentry in his own basement

until the moment he suffered a stroke.

And the plane slipped.

My grandmother called me in great distress.

I drove over and entered the kitchen.

An uncle and aunt sat crying at the table

drinking Chianti and eating chocolate.

Grandfather was my first death.

I owe the fact that I've lived here for so long to Klaus

a reclusive artist who became my mentor.

He helped me get this studio with the special view.

The night I moved in the Berlin Wall fell.

Klaus moved on to New York and we didn't see much of each other.

When I finally was in town I went to see him.

In his kitchen he showed me his new film.

He was going to present it at the Toronto Film Festival.

But the day before the premiere

he had a stroke in the stairwell

and sank down dead.

40 days earlier my mother had died of a renewed breast cancer.

When she was too weak to drive she took the train to Zurich.

"I tell you, they'll never demolish the old station."

That's what she told me.

Otherwise her instincts were always right.

Something to do with a peasant's cunning.

My assistant Lisa is concerned I am obsessed with the past.

Rather than exploring the history of the station

she feels I should find out more about the prison

that's coming in its place.

Twice a week she goes to the Airport Prison

and visits refugees awaiting deportation.

I read her notes on Mourad from Tunisia.

[MOURAD] I'm ashamed to be returning home empty-handed.

We're eleven children.

I am the third youngest.

All my siblings study.

They are clever, able people.

In Switzerland I have wasted my life

and I can never catch up.

The first thing I'll do when I am free

is to sit in a big place and watch how people live.

Then I'll cook something good and eat very slowly.

Someone told me yesterday

I have to stay in prison for at least 3 months more.

I can't go on like this. I'm not a cardboard box.

I have rights. I have done nothing wrong.

Normally when you get locked up you know from when till when and why.

I don't know any of this.

I just want my freedom back.

When I'm filming this moon, Peter comes to visit.

He asks me:

"How was it with your father?"

To me the most important thing was that I got him out of hospital

before he died.

But now I start to hesitate.

Anything I tell him will be taken as a prophecy.

I try to get into the swing of it.

I say my father died two years after being diagnosed.

"You've already been living with it for four years".

"So the signs are you're over the worst of it".

For a year Peter and I share a studio in the mountains.

One day he's heading back to Zurich and offers me a frozen rabbit

which he's just bought from some farmer.

The rabbit was too big for his freezer and he is in a hurry to get back to the city.

I gratefully accept the frozen rabbit.

After it thaws I cook a splendid Lapin au Vin.

Disillusionment comes weeks later when Peter puts a bill in my mailbox.

"So that the rabbit won't be forgotten for ever..."

What should I do?

Scold you, pay you?

Or just keep silent?

One week before his death I get to see Peter for the last time.

He wavers between morphine and lucid recollections.

A friend with flowers comes along.

Time is pressing and nobody wants to be too late.

Peter opens his laptop.

"You got 12,300 admissions but I got 12,800."

Is this going to be an elephant fight? asks the other visitor.

I smile back at her.

This has been our relationship for 30 years

a rivalry on a low flame.

She drops off the flowers and leaves again.

Peter wants to turn on the news.

Several times he comments "That's a strange cut."

Then before the weather forecast I want to turn it off.

No, he wants to watch some of the commercials and smiles at the edits again.

Why does he want to examine the editing of commercials in these last hours?

But what would I do as a lifelong hypochondriac in his place?

Finally it's time to say goodbye.

One last hug. No more firm pressure.

I miss you.

This New Year my resolution is not to think of the dead

but the living.

So bye bye Peter.

These plans have been fought over for decades.

so the workers don't want to rush into making mistakes.

For over two years they've been preparing the ground

but there's no sign of the new building.

For the first time in 50 years

a xenophobic referendum of the populists passed by the narrowest of margins.

The "mass immigration initiative" got 50.3% of our votes.

When Zurich voted for a prison and police centre

was it an omen for this tide of xenophobia?

Today more than 70% of prison inmates are foreigners, and the figure is rising.

Do we secretly expect that in the future

only foreigners will populate our prisons?

Perhaps 99 migrants to one Swiss banker?

Recently the former head of the Raiffeisenbank

was in custody for 106 days for embezzlement.

"What I experienced in the last few weeks I don't wish on anyone", said the CEO.

He even had to spend his 62nd birthday in his cell.

For Bernhard, a German environmentalist custody was a bit pricier.

His wife accused him of wanting to kill her.

So he was detained for 814 days.

She says Bernhard tried to suffocate her with a pillow in the bedroom.

In the 15-minute fight that followed

he clamped her mouth and nose shut with both hands.

Bernhard denies the crime.

He says when he woke up his wife screamed in panic.

She was sitting next to him with a knife in her hand.

He had to hold her.

There never was a fight.

To wind up in jail, one must have done something wrong, right?

I wonder what this costly new building does for people

who will be held in custody here in the future.

Whether the cell windows will rather go onto the tracks or an inner courtyard?

[ABDOUL] I left the Ivory Coast and arrived in Niger.

I had paid to be taken to Libya

but once we got to the Libyan border

they left us in the middle of the dessert with no water and no food.

We walked for five days, day and night.

Our feet were cut to pieces.

It was a rugged dessert with rocks and sand.

On the sixth day we were arrested by the Libyan military.

Those who had money were taken to one side.

Me and another man had nothing in our pockets at all.

So we had to wait all day until sunset.

They picked up the people who had money and drove them to the city.

Me and the other guy with no money, they drove us directly to jail.

This was my first time in prison.

Even the word prison frightened me.

Crossing the desert and prison in Libya took eight and a half months.

When I was young there was no community service.

Just prison, doctor or army.

I was terrified about going to prison and opted for basic training.

But they wanted to send me to officer school.

So I went to see a psychiatrist.

Aron from Eritrea had a harder time escaping from military service.

[ARON] I was posted to be a teacher for illiterates in the army.

One day I was with friends having tea.

We forgot the time because we were having such fun, so I missed work.

I was expecting a pay cut or a warning

but instead they tied my hands to my legs

They left me on the gravel with it's sharp stones.

I screamed, but nobody helped me.

In Jufa prison, you only get one chance to go to the toilet each day.

You have to go barefoot.

In front of you there are armed soldiers

and you get less than ten minutes.

When the whistle goes you have to get up.

Sometimes we just did it in plastic bags.

It was impossible to escape from the barracks.

But me and my friend did it.

We hid in the bushes until the guards had passed

and kept running through the night.

To be punished with wage cuts is ok but not with violence and bondage.

That made me angry and led to me leaving my country.

We are in the fourth year now.

A new door has appeared.

And it must be closed.

[ABDOUL] When you leave Libya on a small ship for Europe

it's like climbing a mountain.

You look at the sea and it is as if it were leaving Europe

and heading down to Africa.

We saw no more horizon.

Luckily the man who steered our boat was intelligent and knew a little about boats.

So he could avoid the waves until we reached the summit.

And when we arrived there the sea looked

as if we had reached a flat earth.

It had three or four different colours.

That surprised us a lot.

From the other side we saw fog coming.

A young woman wanted to jump off the boat.

She was convinced she could see the mainland and wanted to go there.

For her the fog had already turned to earth.

We held the girl and tried to calm her down.

We explained we were still in the middle of the sea.

On the second day the waves came.

Waves like I've never seen before in my life.

It was as if we were stuck in a valley of water.

On both sides, mountains of water.

The waves picked up our boat and we were taken up to the very top.

Only at the very top did the wave release us.

There was a hole in the bottom and the water was pouring in.

We tried to bail out the water while it was flooding in.

We did that for hours.

The next day the water was very calm.

We were all stunned.

What had carried us out of those waves?

But soon it was raining again and the sea became brutal once more.

And so it continued for ten days.

The young woman was pregnant.

She did not survive the tenth day.

She could no longer bear the hunger and fear.

That same evening we were rescued.

A nurse sat by my bed and took care of me.

I asked her, where are we?

And she answered: "this is Malta."

Ah...

Malta? OK.

[SALAH] I washed my face at a fountain near Bellevue.

I still know Lake Zurich from before.

20 years ago I was often here doing business. Back then I was still a bandit.

I spent five years in Swiss prisons.

But I never thought that Switzerland would constrict itself in such a short time.

You Swiss are all crazy.

I'd rather...

what's the opposite of paradise?

Yes, I'd rather live in hell than in this knotty country.

I wanted to get comfy by the lake as I had nowhere to sleep.

Some people spotted me from a nearby terrace

and called the police.

Because I only had my French driving licence with me

they locked me up for three days.

I just wanted to have a look at Lake Zurich.

Out of nostalgia and out of boredom.

Even the little children can't take a joke.

A woman with a stroller passes by.

I stick out my tongue at the little one, no reaction.

You have to mind how your face changes here.

In just a few years it'll stiffen.

I've only seen uptight faces since I've been here.

She caught my attention because she was shy.

But to sell "frozen drinks" demands exactly the opposite.

When filming her I didn't yet know about Nemesis the goddess of vengeance.

She abandoned humanity when it became too decadent.

Trying to escape Zeus she turned into a fish and swam across the oceans.

When finally she reached the end of the world

her shame made her turn into a goose.

But Zeus got her in the end by dressing as a swan.

I wonder whether the girl of the frozen drinks will seize the chance

to become an avenging angel herself.

Or am I just letting myself be carried away?

Recently some anarchists blew up the power supply on the construction site.

Now security and police patrols are active 24/7.

Somebody also blew up a hydrant for water supply.

Who knows when they will strike next?

Security reaches into the DNA of the construction workers.

It seems the fence is finally getting something to enclose.

I wonder if I can keep up with the new pace.

Before there was Zurich

before there were prisons before there were train stations

there was the mighty river Sihl.

It poured down boulders from the Alps.

Today we sit on the delta of the Sihl.

I worry they'll dig up all the sediments the river has deposited here

and disturb the nearby Sihlfeld cemetery

where Peter is buried.

Who knows what other ghosts will be released?

[IBRAHIM] Although I'm not very religious

I would like to pray here in my cell.

But it's got to be done properly.

But turning to Mecca means I sit directly in front of the toilet.

For me that doesn't help contemplation.

God has to wait until Ramadan.

That means eleven months for me and just one for him.

For Peter's last New Year's Eve we drove to the countryside.

We went out to set off a Chinese lantern for him.

But it took a whole box of matches to light the candles.

"Not a good omen", joked Peter.

We watched the lantern fly

until we both had to admit

it had vanished.

I'm glad the real workers are finally here.

The construction workers are a completely different calibre

than the electricians crane drivers or security.

I can feel they often have peasant origins.

They are more archaic less domesticated.

They make straightforward jokes and take their work seriously.

You wouldn't meet them at the Street Food Festival.

I wonder if they'll see this building as one of their great achievements?

[BENJI] It was mega bad.

And now I remember it seems even worse.

Prison is like being tortured.

The cells are small.

Let's say one meter by one meter.

You can't sleep there.

You have to stand up all the time.

Normally I don't want to talk about it.

It's too painful.

There's a sound of water drops coming from a loudspeaker.

And when you're alone there's this blub all the time...

blub...

blub...

It drives you mad.

Once they tied my hands from behind.

They hung me at the top of the cell where there was an opening for cold air.

And as they did slowly, slowly, they turned me round.

Over and over again for hours.

Your head goes somewhere your mind goes blank.

[ABED] Every hour military planes flew over our heads.

We didn't know who they belonged to.

But we always had to take cover in the shelter.

There were many refugees in our village.

I remember my parents let some live in our cellar.

At night I had to watch where the Peshmerga soldiers were sleeping.

The roof was full of holes and the rain came in.

It dripped everywhere on the sleeping bodies.

So I put out pans, bowls, glasses.

Everything I could find to catch the water.

It was a dangerous situation.

Terrorists might be nearby.

There was no light and it was raining hard.

I didn't like being a soldier.

I wanted to study.

But this was the policy that was decided.

Kurds are not good politicians. We are good fighters.

Kurds are notorious for losing in negotiations what's gained on the battlefield.

Our enemies are more sly.

They succeed with their beautiful words

and in the end we lose control of our destiny.

I ask Lisa what she does when she visits refugees in prison.

She says it's not about doing anything special.

It's about being there.

So they know someone's listening to their story.

As soon as you know someone, he's not just a category.

He's got a F-card, a B-card, an N-card, a C-card?

A naturalized citizen or second generation?

Absurd.

They're just people, individuals, humans.

[ABED] I was very sad to hear on the phone

that my mother held a photo of me over her head

before she died in hospital.

She was so sad because of me.

I feel guilty about it now.

My mother, a 59-year-old woman had so many feelings that she died of them.

My own mother showed me her love a little more cautiously.

Shortly before she died she whispered to me:

"I liked silent movies so very much.

But they no longer exist now."

[BIBASTA] I fell in love with someone

but not from the same caste as me.

So my parents wouldn't accept him.

And yet I went with him.

We were together for three or four months.

Then he started drinking and beat me.

He wouldn't let me talk to other people.

He said, why talk to them? Is that your boyfriend or what?

When I wore a new dress he destroyed all my clothes

and hit me again.

So I went back but my family wouldn't accept me.

They said you're already dead to us.

So I went into the jungle to commit suicide.

I had already prepared everything and put a rope around my neck.

When a man came from somewhere

and stopped me.

He took the rope from my neck and told me

"Don't do this".

I don't know where he came from.

He said he was looking for a lost sheep in the jungle.

It's good in Switzerland.

I got here and I thought now I start a new life.

But the authorities told me

there were no more problems in Nepal and I had to go back.

I still dream of falling in love with a man.

No matter where he comes from.

Here in Zurich I see a different future

where I can be independent.

There are so many jobs I could do.

But they all need a B-card qualification.

I hear the authorities announce an overspend at the prison and the police centre.

There's also news for future prisoners awaiting trial.

Originally they wanted to maintain the harsh Zurich regime

where the accused spend 23 hours a day alone in their cells.

This will be abandoned in order to reduce the suicide rate.

Four double cells will now be grouped around common areas

to encourage inmates to live together in groups.

300 prison places are arranged around three narrow inner courtyards

with rather limited daylight.

Any escape attempt would inevitably end up trapped in a courtyard.

Even a determined climber would be stopped at the top by a grid.

So cell windows have been enlarged and their bars removed.

Because they are no longer necessary.

[HAMZA] I've let my beard grow since being in a Swiss prison.

So I can notice how time is passing.

Here in this cell I can't throw my cigarette out of the window.

I can only open the left part of the window.

It has another fine, dense mesh through which you can barely see.

Even the wind does not get through.

My eyes are reduced here to seeing small distances.

Wall, corridor and shower room.

All only a few meters away.

There are so many desperate and frightened people in here.

Sometimes the screaming gets so loud I turn the TV to maximum.

I dance until the guard comes and tells me

everything's calmed down and I should turn it down.

Being imprisoned innocently is a hard blow to the soul.

My nephew said my name on the phone for the first time yesterday.

That made me very sad.

[HAMZA] On New Year's Eve all inmates on my floor

bought Coke from the prison's kiosk.

At midnight we shook the bottles and sprayed them out of the windows.

Many shouted 'Liberty' out into the darkness.

Not me.

Shouting loudly is not my thing.

But hearing the others gave me a warm feeling.

After filming those fireworks

I woke up from a nightmare.

I was in a tiny dark cell.

It was strangely quiet.

Suddenly I heard footsteps in the hallway.

A policeman entered in a red-green uniform like a Santa Claus.

I asked him, why am I here?

But he couldn't hear me.

I began to scream:

"I'm innocent, it's a mistake!"

The policeman turned around:

"Everyone says the same thing."

I had lost my voice and through a small window I saw my city

it was completely destroyed.