The Times of the Titans

Building La Grande Dixence beneath the frozen heart of the Alps

Between 1950 and 1966, thousands of men moved into the high mountains of Valais in French speaking Switzerland, a raw landscape of rock and ice. There, beneath the Matterhorn and other imposing Alpine peaks, they built a temporary civilisation. Entire villages of barracks clung to the cliffs like Tibetan monasteries, while deep inside the mountain a 160 kilometre tunnel labyrinth was blasted into the rock under extreme working conditions. Through this underground network, the waters of 35 glaciers were channelled towards the Grande Dixence, the highest dam in the world.

The Time of the Titans explores this vast engineering enterprise not only as a technical achievement, but as a human and psychological experience. Swiss filmmaker Edgar Hagen accompanies former miners and intellectuals as they return to the cold precipices and abandoned sites that once shaped their lives. In the darkness of the tunnels and the icy solitude of the high Alps, they recall how they escaped poverty, endured accidents, and forged lifelong friendships amid iron and concrete.

Their testimonies evoke survival after tunnel collapses, the apocalyptic force of explosions, smoke and snow, and reflections on the scale of what once seemed a futuristic dream. Nostalgia intertwines with fear and solitude, revealing how this chimerical adventure left indelible marks on those who helped build La Grande Dixence.