Reviews

If filmmaker Alan Zhang had the intention of expunging the lines between reality and fiction and leaving us pondering on the need for such lines, then she has succeeded in her quite brilliant debut This Woman. Both the film and its protagonist, as well as the director herself, leave you guessing about the veracity of what you have just seen - and whether or not it really matters.

The partly animated documentary Behind the Lines, world premiering in Visons du Réel Grand Angle Competition, shows the professional and personal life of Syrian female political cartoonist Amani Al-Ali, who uses her powerful pen to fight both war and patriarchy.

A brutally moving examination of the destruction Russia is leaving behind in Ukraine, When Spring Came to Bucha sees filmmakers Mila Teshaieva and Marcus Lenz enter the small Ukrainian city to film the devastation and optimism that defines the community after 35 days of siege and brutal combat that ended after the Russian military withdrew on March 31 2022.

Filmmaker Sara Dolatabadi has had the good fortune to be the daughter of one of Iran’s most revered writers, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi. In her lyrical and delicate, yet powerful, film she patiently crafts a loving portrait of the great man from personal observations and memories, and written works that underline his incredible talent, intellect and profound knowledge of the human condition.

It takes a while before director Yamina Zoutat reveals where her thirst for blood stems from. But by then you are already completely immersed in a riveting and highly visual musing on blood, blood ties, family, femininity, life and death. Audiences will be rewarded with a new perspective on this substance, as natural as it is magical, which, for the director, very clearly runs thicker than water.

Two parts of Peter Mettler’s planned seven-part series While the Green Grass Grows world premiered in International Competition at Visions du Réel. Centred around the last days of his mother and father respectively, the films are a meditative experience with a calm and clear flow. This is about filming time – time spent with loved ones, time spent with beauty – and moulding it, repeating it, and combining it into the flow of memory, contemplation and art. And as easy as floating down a river.

Benjamin Bucher & Julia Bünter’s film gently offers up an alternative and more human-orientated spin on the subject of the testerone-fuelled world of car racing and Le Mans, with attention placed more on the inner workings of the drivers (or ‘pilots’ are they are called here) than the super-sophisticated and ultra-technical engines and vehicles.

A powerful and desperately moving story of terrible abuse at a Catholic children’s school, Clémence Davigo’s The Lost Boys of La Belle Étoile is both revealing and cathartic as it goes about offering three men the opportunity to break their silence over what happened to them and to discuss how they still feel unseen and unacknowledged by the Church.

Pascale Bourgaux’s documentary in VdR National Competition tells the harrowing story of children born to Yazidi women who were kidnapped and presented as trophies to jihadi fighters in Syria. The insightful film explains how the children, “the bastards of Daesh,” as they became known, are nowadays all but invisible with no official records of their births.

On our physical planet, very few places and communities remain uncharted. But the world wide web is a largely unexplored and ever-growing universe. In Knit’s Island a French film crew go on a digital expedition into a post-apocalyptic world and create a fascinating, original and disconcerting portrait of its inhabitants, in the process opening a door to a whole new documentary genre.