News

The 11th edition of the Verzió DocLab (14 – 18 November) is accepting applications, offering emerging European documentary filmmakers a “high-impact, all-in-one development platform” combining an intensive workshop on editing and story development, the presentation of a trailer or an excerpt to decisionmakers, and one-on-one meetings with international industry professionals.

This year, MDAG Polish Competition will feature ten “outstanding” films competing for three awards – the Best Polish Film Award, the Best Production Award from Smakjam Studio, and the Polish Arthouse Cinemas Association Award. “These are titles awarded at the most important international festivals [and] many of them will have their world premieres,” write organisers. All will celebrate their Polish premieres. The 23rd edition of Millennium Docs Against Gravity runs May 8 to 17 within 7 Polish cities, and online from May 19 to June 1.

The 66th Krakow Film Festival (May 31 to June 7) will open with Marc Isaacs’ Synthetic Sincerity. The festival has also unveiled first titles selected for its International and National Competition sections. “The [opening] film we have selected is a vital contribution that compels us to reflect upon the transformation unfolding before our eyes – the changing role of the creator and our relationship to AI,” says festival director, Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła.

The prizes of the 57th Visions du Réel were handed out April 24. Director Xisi Sofia Ye Chen won the Grand Prize of the International Feature Film Competition with From Dawn to Dawn, her first feature-length film. Hassen Ferhani received the Burning Lights Competition Award for Alea Jacarandas. The National Competition Jury awarded Nicole Nicole, Lauren Dällenbach’s feature debut, and the Audience Award went to Birds of War by Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak.

The Ji.hlava New Visions Forum is a financing, co-production, and networking platform dedicated to supporting documentary production in all its diversity and creativity, and which has served as a successful launchpad for numerous European, Asian, and U.S. documentaries. Projects presented at the Forum over the past three years have gone on to premiere at major festivals, including Hot Docs, Sundance, Rotterdam, Berlinale, Cannes, and Locarno. The submission deadline is April 30.

Visions du Réel unveiled April 22 the winners of the 24th edition of VdR–Industry. More than CHF 80’000 in cash and in-kind prizes were awarded to 12 projects during the awards ceremony in Nyon. The Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, which grants €20,000 to support international co-productions at an early stage, was handed to Uganda by Daniel Mann. The final visions sud est Award, which has long encouraged independent film production in countries with low production capacities with a CHF 10'000 prize, went to Job 1:21 by Samuel Suffren.

In Small Talk, director Mateo Ybarra turns his attention toward the mysterious world of a Swiss finishing school - a place where women come to learn those last lessons in etiquette that will enable them to thrive in high society. “For me, it was really important to be as transparent as possible and to open a dialogue,” the director insists to BDE. He may not share the school’s values but he was determined to treat his subjects with respect. “To make fun of people or to be condescending was not of interest to me.”

Summer Drift (aka Virages) was presented this week in Vision Du Reel’s “Swiss Films Presents” showcase. A few minutes of footage were shown but audiences and buyers will have the chance to see the entire movie next month when it has its world premiere in the Cannes Festival Acid section. “I would say it’s a documentary-comedy, a ‘fiction-réel’ as we say in France, turned into a summer comedy,” producer Aurélien Marsais suggests to BDE.

“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!”