Movie The legacy of Winterthur real estate king Stefanini comes to the movies
Around twenty years ago, director Thomas Haemmerli made a film about how he cleared out the house of his mother, who had suffered from the Messie syndrome. In his latest film, "The Legacy of Bruno Stefanini", he takes a closer look at a manic collector.
Image: Keystone
Winterthur real estate king Bruno Stefanini planned a kind of folk museum. He collected art and all kinds of curiosities for it. His story is now being shown in cinemas under the title "The legacy of Bruno Stefanini".
Image: Keystone
People sorting through Bruno Stefanini's collection wear protective suits - because of the mold that contaminates the objects. The documentary "The Legacy of Bruno Stefanini" tells the story of this incident, among others.
Image: Keystone
Around twenty years ago, director Thomas Haemmerli made a film about how he cleared out the house of his mother, who had suffered from the Messie syndrome. In his latest film, "The Legacy of Bruno Stefanini", he takes a closer look at a manic collector.
Image: Keystone
Winterthur real estate king Bruno Stefanini planned a kind of folk museum. He collected art and all kinds of curiosities for it. His story is now being shown in cinemas under the title "The legacy of Bruno Stefanini".
Image: Keystone
People sorting through Bruno Stefanini's collection wear protective suits - because of the mold that contaminates the objects. The documentary "The Legacy of Bruno Stefanini" tells the story of this incident, among others.
Image: Keystone
"The Legacy of Bruno Stefanini" by Thomas Haemmerli humorously combines Swiss social history with the life of Bruno Stefanini. The son of Italian immigrants was a billionaire real estate owner and manic collector.
20.03.2025, 06:30
20.03.2025, 06:31
SDA
The people sorting Bruno Stefanini's art collection in a hangar wear protective suits as if they were dealing with dangerous bacteria. These are the first images from the documentary film "The Legacy of Bruno Stefanini", which is now being released in cinemas in German-speaking Switzerland. The film opened the Solothurn Film Festival in January.
"It's because of the mold," director Thomas Haemmerli told the Keystone-SDA news agency. People in protective suits sort through the 100,000 objects that Stefanini left behind when he died in 2014 at the age of 94.
Stefanini not only collected first-class art, but also curiosities and lots of bric-a-brac. His extensive legacy also includes 2,200 apartments, castles and the Sulzer high-rise in Winterthur.
Apartments for cohabiting couples
The film shows Stefanini's life against the backdrop of the Cold War - and the ban on so-called wild marriage. Zurich, for example, only lifted the ban on cohabitation, which prohibited unmarried couples from living together, in 1972.
Stefanini, however, showed a flair for the coming social change. He built blocks of flats with one- and two-room apartments for a new population group: unmarried couples and women who were discovering their economic independence.
Stefanini's private life is also the subject of the film. His wife and one of his first girlfriends have their say. They paint a picture of a man who was very fond of women. Also important in Stefanini's life was his secretary, who spent 63 years at his side, always striving to bring order to chaos.
Stefanini was a charismatic man, a successful entrepreneur and a bon vivant who liked to drink and party: "The correspondence he had with his 'girlfriends' throughout his life has been found," said director Haemmerli. The relationships were complex.
Stefanini's path also crossed with that of former SVP Federal Councillor and art collector Christoph Blocher. The two fought over the deposit for an apartment. A few years later, however, they bought works by Albert Anker together at an auction. "I don't know whether Bruno Stefanini and Christoph Blocher were friends or rather acquaintances who both had the same fondness for patriotism and history," says Haemmerli.
After Stefanini had become a billionaire with real estate, he turned his attention to another goal: he wanted to found a kind of folk museum, a collection that would be "an encyclopaedia of the cultural history of the West, for uneducated people, based on objects and memories", says art historian Elisabeth Grossmann in the film.
Stefanini became a manic collector with practically unlimited resources. However, he never opened a museum. Stefanini's daughter Bettina now runs the foundation.
Mouldy works of art
The art objects, some of which were found in screeds in a moldy state, are recorded and made available to museums. The often dilapidated apartments are renovated.
Director Thomas Haemmerli has already tackled similar topics in previous documentaries: "Die Gentrifizierung bin ich" (2017), in which a former squatter becomes a landlord, and "Sieben Mulden und eine Leiche" (2007). In this film, Haemmerli cleared out the house of his deceased mother, who suffered from the Messie syndrome and lived in a completely cluttered apartment. The collector-crazy billionaire from Winterthur obviously also suffered from this illness in the last years of his life
