Nick Cunningham

Every year Visions du Réel organises masterclasses, meetings and debates that are open to the general public and professionals alike. In addition to its three 2024 Guests – Jia Zhang-Ke, Alice Diop and John Wilson – the festival will host discussions with renowned filmmakers such as Claire Denis, Petra Costa and Anna Hints, as well as many directors whose films will be screened publicly for the first time, plus film funders from all over the world.

MetFilm Distribution has confirmed they will release David Allen’s Wilding on June 14, in cinemas across the UK and Ireland. The film is based on Isabella Tree's internationally-acclaimed book published by Picador. Tree's book, a Sunday Times bestseller with over 350,000 sales in the UK and worldwide, has been translated into 8 different languages. The doc premiered at the BFI London Film Festival 2023 and later at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

A total of €938,000 has been granted to five documentary features and one doc series by the Finnish Film Foundation in its latest round of funding (March 2024). The total amount of funding was €5,745,000, with additional support granted to nine fiction features and four shorts.

The festival announces the new ICON DOCS award to be given to one of the 40 selected teams pitching their film projects at DOK.forum (May 1-7). Elsewhere, details of Munich’s’s BY+QC DOC CoPro partnership with Montreal’s Forum RIDM, which enables Canadian talent to take part in the all DOK.forum Marketplace activities, are unveiled. Industry Training Talks to examine the role of media libraries and the transformative effect of AI for doc storytelling, among other themes to be explored.

The 3-module initiative of the Balkan Documentary Centre run in collaboration with One World Romania, has unveiled the slate of doc film projects and podcasts for its inaugural edition. The program kicks off in Bucharest (One World Romania, April 2024, project development), continues with an online session (pitch honing) and culminates at Sofia Documental in September 2024 where the projects will be pitched to professionals.

The Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival and Czech entrepreneur have Jan Barta joined forces to support “outstanding auteur filmmaking” from Central and Eastern Europe by launching the Ji.hlava/JB Films support scheme. The financial support will come in the form of co-production contributions to film projects. Around 3–4 documentary and hybrid films in production or post-production will be supported. One project can receive up to €40,000. Deadline for applications is April 30.

Sixteen new Swiss projects plus one Swiss minority co-pro will be presented across the VdR-Industry programmes in 2024. These are in addition to the 25 Swiss (co)productions that feature in the festival’s official selection. The subject of the Switzerland Meets… event this year are the Austria and German doc industries, during which co-production and networking opportunities between professionals from the featured countries will be examined.

DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Western Canada’s largest documentary film festival running May 2 to 12, will this year showcase a total of 48 features and mid-length films, as well as 34 shorts and a range of Industry events. The festival opens with Shannon Walsh’s Adrianne & the Castle. Closing the festival is Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story.

BDC Discoveries programme entails a six-month process of intense project development across 3 phases (Beldocs in May, Sofia Documental & DOK Leipzig in October) targeted at docmakers from the Balkans, or international teams with Balkan-related projects who are looking for collaboration within the region.

The jury members will bestow the festival’s prizes during the Awards Ceremonies that takes place on Friday 19 April. The Awards for VdR-Industry will be handed out April 17. The 55th edition of Visions du Réel runs April 12–21 2024.