This quite remarkable documentary makes several excursions into the Swiss psyche with a dryly effective manner that avoids stereotyping. Five stories are told that explore the anxieties and temperament of solitude particular to the Swiss. Among them is an old woman, the last of her family, who is being taken, reluctantly, from her home to a sanitarium. When we return to her, she has reinstated herself in the home in which she was born, obviously never to leave. Then there is the specialist who is employed by the government to measure, photograph, and describe in minute detail certain cultural artifacts (a church altar, an old brewery) so that they might be, if not preserved, then recreated following an unspecified disaster. Their parts are coded and kept in an underground vault the size of a small neighborhood. Meanwhile, in a spot near an airport landing strip, a new breed of sedentary sportsmen find the stuff of dreams in watching planes fly and land, much like their bird-watching brethren in the Swiss Alps.