This film may well turn out to be the sleeper of the decade. An unprepossessing story, an unfamiliar cast and crew, a gently comic tone — all these are the basic ingredients of a film that has been almost sensationally successful wherever it has been shown.

Rolf Lyssy's film focusses on a Swiss institution, the stringent procedures that are required before naturalised status is conferred. Applicants are scrutinised to the extent that police officials pry into applicants' private lives. The central characters are two policemen whose job it is to interview, enquire about and shadow three applicants for citizenship: a German psychiatrist and his wife, an Italian pastry-cook and a Yugoslav ballet dancer.

The Swissmakers is the most popular Swiss film ever screened in that country and it is the surprise art-house hit of the year in England. Many of the London critics have compared it favourably with the best products of Ealing Studios. Thus David Castell wrote in The Sunday Telegraph: "This thoroughly enjoyable and accessible comedy makes sharp political points as it strikes the funny bone. The Ealing comedies used to prescribe similar candy-coated pills for our own national pretensions and pomposities. We no longer have that kind of film-making here in Britain: more's the pity."

Rolf Lyssy Born 1936

Feature films — Confrontation (1975), The Swissmakers (1978).