Visions du Réel announced Feb 13 that American filmmaker John Wilson will be Special Guest of the festival’s 55th edition running 12-21 April. Wilson is largely recognised for his 2022 Primetime Emmy Award-nominated documentary series How To with John Wilson. To accompany a selection of episodes from his series and earlier works, Wilson will take part in a public discussion, as well as curate a carte blanche.
Born in Queens, New York, John Wilson is a filmmaker, cameraman and director. After studying documentary filmmaking at the Binghamton University, he shortly worked editing clips of surveillance footage for a private investigator. Alongside this, he started his career as a director of several shorts and a number of commissions, including one for former Talking Heads lead man David Byrne in 2015, and for Vimeo documenting the 2017 Sundance Festival.
The festival stresses how “John Wilson’s left-field humour and quirky eye attracted the attention of Canadian director and producer Nathan Fielder (Nathan For You), thus catalysing their collaboration in the form of the internationally acclaimed HBO series How To with John Wilson;an offbeat exploration of the eccentricities of daily life through a succession of well-observed comic detours, the streets of his native New York as the backdrop. Pastiching the video tutorials ubiquitous on social media, the seriesproposes lessons on trivial themes which border on the absurd: ‘How To Cook the Perfect Risotto’, ‘How To Put Up Scaffolding’, ‘How To Clean Your Ears.’”
“Each exploration sparks a succession of improbable meetings with strangers, some bizarre and fascinating, following an idiosyncratic logic and offbeat association of ideas,” the festival continues.
“Always from an unassuming starting point, Wilson’s work reaches for depth,” VdR adds. “His anti-spectacular cinematography, which assumes a formal austerity inspired by Gonzo journalism, illustrates the comic potential hidden in the banality of the everyday. Without ever distracting from the highly entertaining premise of his project, John Wilson implicitly questions the human condition, the absurdity of existence, and the complexity of the modern world in a set of remarkably effective DIY wild goose chases.” The final season of the series was broadcast last summer and received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
Emilie Bujès, Artistic Director of the Festival, comments: “The aim of Visions du Réel is to ceaselessly explore the full spectrum of non-fiction cinema, in all its richness and diversity, and in all its freedom. Welcoming a filmmaker such as John Wilson is both a great honour and an incredible opportunity to showcase a singular and original body of work: joyful, personal, droll, collaborative and highly contemporary, all with [a] cinephile eye.”
The full programme of VdR 2024 (12-21 April) will be announced March 19.
