Reviews

In following Japanese Noriko Oi on her return to her home town of Nagasaki, Canadian filmmaker Laurence Lévesque provides a delicate and emotional document of a journey into both a personal history and a national trauma, shedding new light on both and underlining the importance of shared memory.

In Limbo (W zawieszeniu) is an intimate and insightful look at the war in Ukraine as seen from the viewpoint of a very particular family, and presented in very personal form. Set against other films from Ukraine which focus on frontline battles, the film is a welcome and moving glimpse into the lives of an ordinary family unit at the onset of the conflict.

In trying to get to the roots of her childhood traumas, filmmaker Maka Gogaladze lays bare the soul of her Georgian nation. What at first appears to be an ego-documentary turns out to be a beautiful portrait of the Georgian mentality and its cultural richness.

A protest film rather sweetly dressed-up as a science-fiction discourse, Tobias Nölle’s essay film intriguingly offers up the notion of an android arriving in modern-day Germany from a future in which humans no longer exist, determined to discover what happened to machines and also try and talk with the King of the Humans.

A crowd-pleaser about pleasing a crowd, Orkhan Aghazadeh’s The Return of the Projectionist, world-premiering in Visions du Réel’s International Feature Film Competition, celebrates the rekindled love for the communal cinema experience in a small Azeri village, with the doc images themselves begging to be seen on the big screen.

In what feels like a cinematic counterpart to Ivo Andrić’s literary masterpiece The Bridge on the Drina, Swiss filmmaker Nicole Vögele’s The Landscape and the Fury, world-premiering in Nyon, juxtaposes the natural tranquility of the north-western Bosnian landscape with the fury of human struggles past and present, as modern-day refugees pass through areas still mined after the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

In Apple Cider Vinegar by Sofie Benoot, which world-premiered at VdR 2024, a kidney stone is the unusual prompt for a narrative that reflects on the often imperceptible connections between life and nature. It is a unique and almost unquantifiable film, but also an engaging and intriguing one.

In visually breathtaking fashion, and full of wonderfully human, slightly absurdist observations, As the Tide Comes In tells the story of the Danish Wadden Island of Mandø through the character of Gregers, its last farmer resident. At the same time, it is, inevitably, a story about climate change and humankind’s fight for - and against - nature.

The Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand is the first river in the world to be recognised as a legal person - as a living and indivisible being – and this engaging and informative documentary might well be the first film where a river receives a shared on-screen ‘created by’ credit along with filmmaker Petr Lom and his producer partner Corinne van Egeraat.

A generously revealing exploration into the life of Wilfred Buck, an elderly member of the indigenous Cree people of Canada, Lisa Jackson’s engaging film also acts as a spiritual guide to the heavens as it moves between past and present, and between Earth and the stars, aiming to overcome the ghosts of colonisation.