Reviews

More than anything Inner Lines, selected for International Competition, sends out a message of displacement and of disorientation - both geographically and mentally. It is an important and artful film, but dealing with the Yazidi genocide it is far from an easy watch.

Edited from countless home movies, Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend not only shows her best friend Kimi’s descent into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.

A Holy Family offers an engaging, at times very moving, examination of a family that has struggled to find its balance, but which opens up to eventually appreciate and even understand each other. Review by Mark Adams.

As unlikely it sounds, Dogwatch is a delight to watch, an aesthetically pleasing and almost poetic observation of three men working as armed guards on ships traversing pirate-infested waters.

Chaylla is a powerful portrait of a woman fighting her addiction to an abusive relationship as well as a substantiated plea for a more empathic judicial system. A rewarding, inspiring and sometimes uncomfortable journey, and one totally worth taking.

An elegant and insightful blend of childlike art, music and observation helps elevate Vida Dena’s documentary My Paper Life (Ma vie en papier) to something rather special, and helps deliver a thoughtful and warm immersion into the thoughts, memories and present-day realities for a Syrian family who have escaped the war and are now living in Belgium.

Though conventional in tone and structure, Steven Vit’s My Old Man also manages to be gently profound as it dwells on a childhood spent in a conventional family (not unlike countless ones encountered in Switzerland and elsewhere) and the director’s realisation that he doesn’t really know the often-absent father who would call from the other side of the world to say goodnight when he was a child.

An intriguing and languid blend of magical realism and observational documentary, Tizian Büchi’s Like An Island (L'îlot) presents the often enigmatic story of two men whose job is to watch over the area around the Vuachère, the burbling river running through a suburban neighbourhood in Lausanne (Switzerland).

World premiering in Visions du Réel’s International Feature Film Competition, Éclaireuses follows two passionate teachers in Brussels who create their own little safe space for children – many of them refugees – who never went to school before. The doc may eschew analysis of wider pedagogical issues but shines a deserved light on two teachers who lovingly, patiently, and professionally take care of children who have fallen through the cracks of the system.

Deep into indigenous territory within the Brazilian rainforest a local activist and his team are fighting back with a video camera as a weapon. Their provocative and often heart-breaking story is impressively recorded by documentary director and cinematographer Alex Pritz who joins them to stress the urgency of the dilemma facing both land and people.