A young visual arts student joins a small group of armed left wing extremists to film a kidnapping.

Picture gallery

A man in his fifties who lives comfortably in Geneva decides to make public secret videos he made in 1978, when he joined a small group of armed left wing extremists calling themselves GAR. As a shy, 20-year-old visual arts student, he was accepted by the five terrorists to film the kidnapping of an agent of the Paraguayan dictator Strossner, who made regular trips to deposit millions in a Swiss bank. Their aim is to make him confess on camera for the Swiss media. While they're good at getting high and dreaming of making headlines, they are blocked by their idealism and their contradictions; the five wannabe revolutionaries will fail miserably in their attempt...

A pleasant surprise that is light years away from the masochistic, pretentious offerings financed by the Office of Culture in Bern, this humorous thriller filmed with a subjective eye offers a portrait of five kids trying to change the world by disrupting the bourgeoisie – without glorifying or mocking its subjects. After Opération Casablanca, Opération Libertad seems to confirm a new trend in Swiss cinema: the less a movie is subsidized Bern, the better it is.