Visions du Réel 25

Given annually during Visions du Réel to a film that highlights current issues shaping the future world, The UN Perception Change Award was presented April 9 to Britta Strampe (Bandenfilm) producer of Daniel Abma’s The Family Approach. The film, which also won the ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness at DOK Leipzig 2024, focuses on the lives of five teenagers who live together and the social workers who look after them.

Lulu Scott’s new feature doc Where Two Oceans Meet (a world premiere in Nyon) looks very closely at the life of a family in Mitchells Plain, a township not far from the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Kulsum Orrie and her two children are waiting patiently for the release of her husband, Phadiel, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence. 30 years after the end of the Apartheid, Kulsum is still enduring her own separation. Director Scott talks to BDE.

In the Mexican documentary Niñxs (a gender-free spelling of ‘children’ in Spanish), director Kani Lapuerta follows trans girl – and friend – Karla for eight years until she enters high school. Looking back from the present, the pair also provide a commentary track on Kani’s film, criticising, discussing and changing the narrative. It’s clever, and it works – and could work for many other documentaries as well.

Roland Edzard’s new documentary, world-premiering in Nyon, takes us into the heart of the Central Sahara Gold Rush. The director asks his characters to re-enact their own story. “The movie in itself is a documentary because it is real people in a real situation and it’s real life,” he tells BDE. “But it’s a documentary that I did like fiction…I didn’t want to explain but to be inside [the story]. I can say it is done like a fiction [film] because I say ‘action’ and I say ‘cut.’”

“I wouldn’t say it was exactly a carte blanche, but it was close to it,” Montreal-based director Sophie Bédard Marcotte says of the freedom given to her by backers National Film Board of Canada when she embarked on I Lost Sight Of The Landscape (a world premiere in Burning Lights at VdR this week). In the film, Marcotte turns her camera on her playwright neighbour as he develops his latest work within an artist co-operative.

In Benjamin Bucher’s debut feature, Joyce, a 22-year-old African-Chinese dancer, tries to find her way in Europe – torn between artistic and identity-related self-discovery and the financial dependence on her mother’s TikTok business. “The film deals with universal themes that many of us can relate to, such as the search for independence, migration and globalisation, identity and the attempt to preserve real moments in an increasingly staged world,” producer Olivier Zobrist tells BDE.

Anne-Frédérique Widmann’s Shewit, produced by Luc Peter and Katia Monla, tells a very 21st century tale of migration, exile and perseverance. “We wanted to discover the changes in Shewit, who arrived in 2015 very weakened by her 3-year journey from Eritrea to Switzerland,” Peter tells BDE. “And who, little by little, gains self-confidence and becomes a fighter in the face of the administrative difficulties linked to her refugee status, and finally emancipates herself to become a free woman.”

Producer Louis Mataré tells Business Doc Europe about his work-in-progress Heat, shot in the Persian Gulf and directed by Jacqueline Zünd. “HEAT deals with one of the most pressing global challenges of our time,” he says. “Rather than relying on dystopian visions or didactic messaging, the film explores the sensory and emotional resonance of heat as both a physical state and a social metaphor.”

Director/producer Dea Gjinovci discusses her work-in-progress project, set for a Spring/Summer 2025 release. In the film, the director and her exiled father return to his childhood village to recreate his memories with the help of local villagers. “My film explores universal themes at the heart of many of today’s crises: exile, cultural erasure, intergenerational trauma caused by oppression, the loss of material heritage, impunity, and the search for truth,” Gjinovci tells BDE.

Welcome to Boca Chica, Texas. This is where Elon Musk has built his SpaceX launchpad. It’s also where Julien Elie went to make his new feature doc, Shifting Baselines. Alongside the footage of the space rockets, the documentary also includes imagery of nature. “Seeing those beautiful birds just flying by those rockets is really sad,” director Julien Elie tells BDE. “It is painful to see this. You wonder what we are doing now…it was a unique place, Boca Chica, but it is not anymore.”