Visions du Réel '23

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 sounds like something out of a Michael Mann film. Iván Simonovis, formerly one of Venezuela’s top police officers, is under strict house arrest on trumped up charges. He cuts off the security tag on his ankle, clambers down a very high wall, is spirited away by well-wishers, goes into hiding and eventually escapes Venezuela on a speed boat. His son Iván discusses with BDE the film he made of his father’s extraordinary life.

Sales company Split Screen has acquired world rights for Planet B, the third feature by filmmaker and climate activist Pieter Van Eecke, which celebrated its world premiere at Visions du Réel. The film is produced by Hanne Phlypo for Belgian production outlet Clin d'oeil films in co-production with Katja Draaijer and Frank Hoeve for BALDR Film (the Netherlands), broadcaster VRT and Shelter Prod.

Portuguese Catarina Mourão’s new doc, world premiering at Visions du Réel, looks at an extraordinary, long concealed chapter in the life of its protagonist, Martim Santa Rita Masasri. Now in his late 50s, Martim was 15 he went to live and study in the Soviet Union, in Astrakan where he discovered sex and alcohol and fell deeply in love. When he returned to Portugal he bore deep psychological scars. The director explains more to BDE.

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.

The painful and often tragic stories of refugees seeking to make their way to places of safety make for familiar documentary viewing, but Juliette de Marcillac’s striking Nightwatchers (Veilleurs de nuit) dwells more unusually on a snowy Alpine border where many migrants make a perilous night-time trek through the cold and snow to try and cross from Italy into France.

Offering intriguing anthropological insight into the background and current circumstances of one of Europe’s remaining nomadic ethnic groups, Ruäch – A Journey into Yenish Europe (Ruäch – Eine Reise ins Jenische Europa) also provides an appropriately oblique and complex look into a community whose members often seem reluctant to discuss the secrets and complexities of their culture.

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.

The winners of the professional section of VdR-Industry were unveiled during the award ceremony Wednesday 26 April. Hosted for the first time by Sophie Bourdon, VdR-Industry welcomed 1,600 professionals representing nearly 80 countries, a similar number to the record 2022 edition. More than 500 individual meetings were held over three days. All award winners follow…

‘A person who dies without a name is like a story without an ending,’ reads the logline for Pure Unknown, screening in VdR Int'l Competition. The core objective of Italian forensic pathologist Cristina Cattaneo, profiled in the film, is to find an ending for as many stories as possible. “I completely fell in love with…her mission and her ethical approach to her work, to her life and to the lives of others,” co-director Mattia Colombo tells BDE.