Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner passes away

Geneva: Prolific Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner, considered a pioneer of Switzerland´s new wave film movement, died Sunday at the age of 92, his foundation said.

"Alain Tanner was one of the beacons of Swiss cinema," his foundation said in a statement issued in consultation with his family.

Tanner was an internationally renowned director with more than two dozen films to his name, who began his career in the late 1950s.

A contemporary of the French New Wave, he is credited with helping launch Switzerland´s own, smaller new wave in the 1970s, along with colleagues Miche Soutter, Claude Goretta, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange.

Their "Group of 5" spurred a renewal in Swiss films reflecting the era´s spirit of nonconformity.

Tanner´s first full-length feature film, "Charles, Dead or Alive", which appeared in 1969, marked the beginning of politically engaged cinema in Switzerland.

That film, which tells the story of a businessman who decides to abandon mainstream capitalist life to take up a marginal existence on the fringe of society as student protests rage, won the top prize at the Locarno film festival.

Among his best-known films are "Jonas who will be 25 in the Year 2000," from 1976 and "Light Years Away", which won the Grand Prix at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.