Visions du Réel '21

Mexican-American director Natalia Almada’s documentary Users is a poetic meditation both on motherhood and on the way that technology is disrupting humans’ relationship with the natural world. The director gets lyrical with Business Doc Europe.

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.

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.

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.

Visions du Réel director Emilie Bujès opens up to Business Doc Europe about the 2021 edition that welcomes back filmmakers, industry and specific audiences to Nyon. “Ideologically for us, this is a very important gesture,” she underlines of the festival’s first tentative steps towards normality.

International sales/aggregation outfit LevelK has acquired world sales rights for the Brazilian documentary feature From Love No One Escapes, which depicts the lives of inmates inside a Brazilian jail where there are no guns or guards. The film screens at Visions du Réel market running 14-22 April.

Business Doc Europe talks to feature doc debutante Marie Eve Hildbrand whose Healers, both a family affair and a wide-ranging meditation on different approaches to (and philosophies about) healthcare, launches the 52nd edition of Visions du Réel.

In Bellum – The Daemon of War, Swedish directors David Herdies and Georg Götmark invite three disparate characters to meditate on their perceptions of war, a US veteran of Afghanistan, a Swedish developer of AI for use in battle, and a US photographer whose latest work chronicles the Afghanistan conflict.

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.

Czech director Pavel Borecký’s eco-documentary Living Water is on quite a run. It is showing in Visions du Réel in National Competition; in the CPH:SCIENCE section of CPH:DOX shortly afterward and then in Movies That Matter in the Netherlands in a screening arranged in co-operation with the Dutch Ministry Of Foreign Affairs.