Geoffrey Macnab

“It’s always good to tell sad stories with a glimpse of burlesque humour,” Italian-Swiss director Davide Tisato reflects on his new project Two Donkeys and a Saint (Il Nostro Miracolo, presented this week in Visions du Réel’s ‘Swiss Films Previews’ strand). In the film, a motley crew of inhabitants from rural Tuscany set out on a 200km walk to the Vatican in Rome to petition the Pope to intervene on behalf of their struggling community. They’re accompanied by two donkeys and a statue of a local saint, ‘Santa Caterina.’

US indie cinema’s most fastidious (and ostensibly fiction) director Kelly Reichardt talked at length about her love of small things and her “granular” approach to filmmaking during her VdR Masterclass, presented April 21. “While we were having lunch, Emilie [Bujès, VdR Artistic Director) was trying to convince me that there is not a difference [between documentary and fiction]. As I said, I don’t know how documentaries are made. It is such a different process. I love watching them…[but] everything I do, it’s all made up!”

In Edgar Hagen’s new film, The Roots Of Madness (screening in The National Competition at Visions Du Réel), the filmmaker accompanies the near-legendary German war reporter Ulrich Tilgner on a journey back to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond. “The special thing about him is that he always tried to understand the people, not only the politics,” Hagen observes of the journalist’s humanistic, ground-level approach to his work.

In his essay-style documentary, director G. Anthony Svatek uses the story of Alexander von Humboldt, once the world’s most famous scientist, as a way of exploring contemporary environmental issues. “I thought the strongest way to do that is in the form of a love letter from me to him, showing him what is left of his vision of an interconnected world and how technology has totally changed this idea of a holistic ecology that he proposed.”

Ghost Town (screening in official selection in Vision Du Réel) joins the growing ranks of documentaries and docudramas set in taxis. The setting is Kamaishi, a small Japanese town where the locals haven’t been able to exorcise memories of the devastating 2011 tsunami. As we discover, the catastrophe still dominates the conversations and even the dreams of the local people. Director Katharine Round discusses her new work with BDE.

A Fire There (sold by Filmotor) sees Montreal-based filmmaker Marlene Edoyan venturing to the remote village of Gandzani, a predominantly Armenian enclave within southern Georgia. Her three main characters are young men on the cusp of adulthood and facing familiar decisions about their future. “It was like finding a part of my past almost,” Edoyan says. “I came across a group of people [and] recognised something very familiar, maybe a fragment of my story of displacement.”

It is well known that in space, nobody can hear you scream, but in the case of the astronauts on the 1973 NASA Skylab mission, nobody could hear their demands for better working conditions either. Everything the crew did was measured by their controllers in Houston who wanted as much data as possible about how humans coped in space - and didn’t care a jot for their well-being. In his new feature doc, nominated by Visions du Réel for the Doc Alliance Prize, UK doccer Graeme Arnfield investigates the incident further. He reports in to BDE.

The logistics sound daunting: 40 cinematographers and more than 300 people filming in 64 locations combined to create the collective portrait of a single July night in Ukraine. In her epic new film, Olga Chernykh draws together imagery of everything from nightclubs to air raids, from soldiers on the frontline to women giving birth, from passengers aboard a train about to head east to wildlife coming out after dark. "It’s about resilience and strength, of course, and about love - love for each other and love for the country,” Chernykh tells BDE.

In her new film, French director Emma Boccanfuso follows the remarkable Mother Courage-like Sueli, a flamboyant local woman living in a Rio favela and fighting to hold her extended family together, while running her own makeshift bar and enjoying plenty of gossip with the neighbours. “I very quickly found myself propelled into the heart of the home and the intimacy of this family,” the director tells BDE. “From there, a deep friendship was born, to the point that I have been coming back several times a year to see them for the past ten years.”

When Dutch filmmaker Jona Honer first visited China, he soon worked out that the easiest way to connect with the young and extremely affluent sub-strata of Chinese society was through their favourite nightclubs. He was also fascinated by the rituals of capitalism, which resembled more a religion in terms of its structure and the social support it offered. “They [the club goers] create their own symbols, maybe without knowing it consciously,” Honer tells BDE. “Every religion has its own symbols. They create their own value system…it’s more than a night out.”