Visions du Réel '21

The Visions du Réel Industry programme commences April 14, with its usual panoply of pitching and networking events/opportunities and debates, presented both online and live. Head of Industry Madeline Robert guides BDE through the programme.

29 projects to participate across Pitch, Work-in-Progress and Rough Cut Lab forums. Industry Awards, including 3 new cash prizes, to be granted by a jury comprising Roberto Olla (Eurimages), Italian director Roberto Minervini and Rasha Salti, Comm Editor for Arte France. VdR Industry to take place April 14-22, both online and on-site.

French director Julie Ramage discusses her new documentary How To Order Online, about the creative lengths prisoners can go to maintain human and economic exchange when access to communication is limited or denied.

In her new film Zinder (screening in competition in Visions du Reel and in Change Makers at CPH Dox) Aicha Macky looks at gang culture in Niger from the inside. She explains her film to Business Doc Europe.

“To me, it was clear from a very early point that I am not doing a film about the murder. I am doing a film about the news [reports] of the murder,” Jan Ijäs emphasises to BDE of his intentions behind Belgrade Forest Incident, in which he visits the Istanbul locations associated with the shocking death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

It’s the island that time passed by. Once a thriving community in the Soviet era, it is now largely abandoned by the Russian government. And co-director Svetlana Rodina’s interested in it was piqued by a photograph, she tells Business Doc Europe.

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?

A magical exploration of the mushroom in scientific, practical, gastronomic and philosophical contexts, viewed as foodstuff, medicine, hallucogen or metaphor. In Neumann’s beautiful film the mushroom might not actually speak, but it is telling us a lot.

Austrian filmmaker Valerie Blankenbyl made her doc The Bubble, about a vast Florida retirement complex, just as her parents were eyeing up their own retirement. The director tells BDE about octogenarian snogging, the political power that such an institution exerts as well as the new lease of life many of the residents feel they have been presented.

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.