Visions du Réel '21

On April 24, the VdR Int’l Feature Film Competition jury comprising filmmaker Thomas Imbach, Savina Neirotti (Artistic Director Torino Film Lab) and Josh Siegel (MoMA) awarded the 2021 Grand Jury Prize to Faya Dayi by Jessica Beshir. Special Jury Awards were given to 1970 by Tomasz Wolski & Les Enfants terribles by Ahmet Necdet Cupur. All awards follow.

Visions du Réel will open its doors to the general public from Thursday 22 April to festival end on April 25. Over four days, the Festival will hold around 50 public screenings, showcasing films from the International, Burning Lights, National and Grand Angle Competitions.

At the beginning of the pandemic Michele Aiello was granted permission to take his camera into the general hospital of Brescia, Northern Italy, close to Europe’s then-Covid epicentre. His subsequent doc My Place Is Here chronicles the terror, the love, the bitter sadness and the bravery that he witnessed. He talks to BDE.

In Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege Abdallah, Al-Khatib has composed a love song to a place that resists, with dignity, the atrocities of war.

This elegant and measured portrait of Zinder’s marginalized and dangerous Kara-Kara district takes all the time necessary in getting to know the area, its people and their social life. Acknowledging the poverty and history of violence, director Aicha Macky finds hope in those striving for a better tomorrow.

Aana, the new doc project from Swedish production outfit Film and Tell was pitched this week at Visions du Réel Industry. The film, which will complete in 2023, tells the intimate story of a young woman trying to live a normal life in spite of the late effects of the harsh cancer treatment she went through as a child.

US film director Raoul Walsh made close to 150 films, and Argentinean director/film professor Nicolás Zukerfeld has seen a great many of them, he tells BDE. But there was something that Walsh may or may not have said which became an obsession for Zukerfeld, and which he was determined to get to the bottom of…

Though rooted in a very specific time and place (Belarus, 2020), director Paluyan has managed to make his documentary seem timeless, almost absolute.

A mesmerizing visual essay on the impact of technology. It doesn’t judge but observes, and it poses questions which don’t necessarily need answering.

This encounter between a solitary French settler and three First Nation hunters on a remote Canadian island has been stylised as a horror film, including unsettling music, bloody animal carcasses, failing mobile reception and even a chainsaw. The question is: why?