Visions du Réel '23

On our physical planet, very few places and communities remain uncharted. But the world wide web is a largely unexplored and ever-growing universe. In Knit’s Island a French film crew go on a digital expedition into a post-apocalyptic world and create a fascinating, original and disconcerting portrait of its inhabitants, in the process opening a door to a whole new documentary genre.

Argentinean director Pedro Speroni discusses his latest documentary, which concerns the charismatic Iván Bilbaos whom the director met when making his previous documentary Rancho (2021), set inside a maximum security prison. Now Bilbaos is out of jail and back with his wife and daughter, making a living as a money lender. “I think it is a film about a guy who is trying to get ahead,” the director says. “Like a boxer, he is always fighting to have a better life.”

It’s clear that Flemish filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke sees traces of himself as a youngster in the 13-year-old Bo, the effervescent main character of his new feature documentary Planet B, a world premiere in Grand Angle at Visions du Réel. She is a teenage climate activist who, together with her friend Luca, throws herself into protests. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

Watching Alberto Martín Menacho’s debut observational feature Antier noche without any prior knowledge, I found it hard to see why these seemingly mundane aspects of village life in Spain were being documented. Reading a bit more background information helped. But only to a degree…

It’s an area of bleak, windswept majesty. The border area between Armenia and Azerbaijan has rolling mountains and long, dry plains. It has been the site of constant skirmishes including a 44-day war in 2020. It is also the location for Daniel Kötter’s Landshaft, and the latest of several projects by the German artist and filmmaker that have dealt with what he calls ‘political geography,’ he tells BDE.

Swiss-Canadian director Peter Mettler discusses his epic new feature series While the Green Grass Grows, which is expected eventually to run for up to 12 hours. Parts one and six are an elegy for his parents, whose passing they chronicle. “For me, it’s…almost a way of going through that process; of becoming an orphan, being an only child as well and [with] no other family. It was very much a separation from my family,” the director reflects to BDE on the loss he experienced.

‘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.

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.

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.

The conjoined storylines of a local construction worker and a Chinese engineer, both involved in building a bank in the Central African Republic and both with major issues concerning their personal lives, provides a fascinating – and beautifully shot – insight into day-to-day existence in a country where circumstances are tough and where rumours of civil war are rife.