Visions du Réel '23

Seven or eight years ago, after her grandmother died, Estonian filmmaker Liis Nimik began to think deeply about the life the old lady had lived. Her grandmother certainly wasn’t wealthy but she “always had everything she needed and peace in her heart,” Nimik observes to BDE. In her new documentary Sundial, also at Hot Docs, Nimik looks for other Estonians living in the same calm and contented way as her grandma.

In her intriguingly titled 40-minute (…), Dutch director Karina Beumer seeks to remind her loving father Ron of her existence after he develops Acquired Brain Injury, a debilitating condition which deprives him of long and short-term memory. “My first goal was to make the film from my father's perspective,” says Beumer. “But of course, it's my psychological perspective too…”

Two parts of Peter Mettler’s planned seven-part series While the Green Grass Grows world premiered in International Competition at Visions du Réel. Centred around the last days of his mother and father respectively, the films are a meditative experience with a calm and clear flow. This is about filming time – time spent with loved ones, time spent with beauty – and moulding it, repeating it, and combining it into the flow of memory, contemplation and art. And as easy as floating down a river.

Swiss Films’ Consultant on Documentary Film & Marketing Strategies Charlotte Ducos, and Head of Festivals & Markets Andreas Bühlmann, fill in Business Doc Europe ahead of the annual showcase of high-end Swiss docs ready to be launched onto the international market. The 6-project showcase is presented April 25 in Nyon. 25 Swiss (co-productions) are selected for VdR 2023, including three in International Competition.

New York-based artist and filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins has been collecting physical publicity slides from movies for a number of years. These stills are used in ingenious fashion in his new project Still Film (an international premiere at Visions). As the images, some of them very familiar, are projected on screen, a voice is heard on the soundtrack talking about memory, technology and cinema. The director talks to BDE.

Benjamin Bucher & Julia Bünter’s film gently offers up an alternative and more human-orientated spin on the subject of the testerone-fuelled world of car racing and Le Mans, with attention placed more on the inner workings of the drivers (or ‘pilots’ are they are called here) than the super-sophisticated and ultra-technical engines and vehicles.

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.

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.

Pascale Bourgaux’s documentary in VdR National Competition tells the harrowing story of children born to Yazidi women who were kidnapped and presented as trophies to jihadi fighters in Syria. The insightful film explains how the children, “the bastards of Daesh,” as they became known, are nowadays all but invisible with no official records of their births.

Visions du Réel Industry kicks off April 23 ahead of 5 days of intense but ‘relaxed’ activity, Industry head Sophie Bourdon tells BDE. Professionals will gather to do business, but they can also “step back a bit” from the renewed freneticism that inevitably followed the lifting of Covid restrictions. In 2023, 31 project teams from 32 countries will discuss their new and upcoming projects within the event’s core pitch and laboratory programmes.