My films revolve around absence, Swiss documentarian Richard Dindo has said, but the phrase, however felicitous, is misleading. While it’s true that the subjects of most his documentaries are dead and thus literally absent from the frame, his films also have a greater feeling of presence in the Buddhist sense of existing in the moment than the work of most of his peers. Dindo achieves this effect by relying primarily on eyewitness accounts, original texts, and authentic environments and landscapes to gradually immerse the viewer in the world of his subjects, who range from writers Arthur Rimbaud, Max Frisch to artists Auschwitz casualty Charlotte Salomon to revolutionaries Che Guevara to ordinary citizens who perform extraordinary acts and suffer for them Paul Grüninger.

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