Mauro Mueller's "111 – Echoes From Halifax" screens at the Zurich Film Festival, which runs Sept. 24 – Oct. 4. The film chronicles the crash of Swissair Flight 111, which killed 229 people on Sept. 2, 1998, along the coast of Nova Scotia — but Mueller refuses to call it a disaster movie.

"We already know how the flight ends," the Swiss-Mexican filmmaker told Variety ahead of the film's premiere in his home country. "I didn't want to build suspense around whether people would survive when the families watching know that they didn't."

"The question that interested me was how you continue living after something like this," Mueller said. "I also wanted to leave room for the contradictions in grief. People laugh, become angry, feel desire, or find themselves unexpectedly close to a stranger. There isn't one way to experience it, and I wanted the characters to have that freedom rather than asking them to remain solemn throughout."

The project began with Fidelio Films producer Björn Hering, the son-in-law of flight pilot Urs Zimmermann. Hering had wanted for years to make a film about the tragedy and urged his creative partner Mueller to take it on. The director needed a decade to find his way into the story. The accident remains deeply etched into Swiss and Canadian collective memories; the film addresses how family members struggled to find answers about their loved ones and how the tragedy forever changed the lives of those living on the coast of Nova Scotia.

Mueller says he was "moved by how people could offer one another comfort" following the tragedy. "That's where I found the film: in those unexpected relationships and the resilience people discovered through one another as they tried to find a way forward," he said.

The personal connection sharpened his sense of responsibility. "I was always conscious that people I knew and cared about would eventually sit down and watch what we had made," Mueller said. "With Björn, there was an ongoing conversation about what felt honest and where we needed to be careful. His closeness to the story was invaluable, but we knew that one family's experience couldn't stand for everyone's. That made it essential to listen just as carefully to people whose experiences were different."

The central characters and their stories are fictional, the director reiterated. "Urs appears briefly in the epilogue as a personal homage, bringing the film back to someone whose life helped set this project in motion," he said.

Mueller translates his curiosity about the many shapes of grief through magical realism. "Grief can change your experience of time, of a place, of what an ordinary coincidence means to you," he said. "At certain moments, I wanted the film to enter that subjective experience, to find an image for something the characters couldn't put into words. I was trying to photograph a feeling."

The production faced hard constraints. Mueller cites the difficulty of "matching the ambition of the film to our resources." Financing in Canada fell short of the original plan, which forced some interior scenes to move to Switzerland. The schedule was tight, and the team had to be "inventive" with locations: Halifax Airport stood in for both Geneva and JFK, and the crew had to find a convincing American-style kitchen in Switzerland. "Those are the practical details you don't necessarily think about when you're writing," he noted.

The water scenes pushed the production hardest. "The scenes on the water were particularly demanding, especially at night," Mueller said. "We had to recreate the floating wreckage while working on a moving boat, dealing with seasickness and trying to give the actors the space to deliver emotionally truthful performances. Protecting the time and concentration those performances needed, amid all the practical demands, was one of the biggest challenges."

Shooting in Nova Scotia, where the accident took place, "mattered enormously" to Mueller and his team. "The coastline is beautiful, but once you understand what happened there, you experience it differently. We wanted to capture something of the memory the landscape holds alongside its beauty. Our cinematographer, Claudine Sauvé, brought a remarkable sensitivity to that," he said.

Swiss programmers and industry experts have called the film "Switzerland's most anticipated film," a label Mueller does not take lightly. "It's humbling, and of course it brings a certain amount of pressure," he said. "The tragedy remains part of Switzerland's collective memory, so I understand why people are curious about how a film might approach it. Some will also come with very personal memories and understandable apprehension."

The Zurich screening carries particular weight because former Swissair pilots will be in the theater. "I'm conscious of what it means to invite them into a cinema to revisit those memories. My hope is that they feel the care with which we approached the story, and that there's room afterwards to talk," Mueller said.

The premiere also marks a milestone in the director's career. "It's also a special moment for me personally: after directing two features and several shorts abroad, this is my Swiss debut as a feature director," he added. "Much of my career has taken place internationally, so bringing this film to audiences at home means a great deal."