Visions du Réel 25

Vladlena Sandu’s dramatic and poetic hybrid film tells a deeply personal story of life during the Chechen war as neighbours are murdered, her family is targeted, and the capital Groznyis  turned into a battlefield. The film also seeks an answer to a fundamental question. How can the cycle of violence - that shapes the lives of children and is inevitably passed to the next generation - be broken?

The Big Chief is the latest documentary in which Tomasz Wolski rakes over the ashes of recent Polish history. Following on from An Ordinary Country, 1970 and A Year in the Life Of a Country, it tells the story of Leopold Trepper, a spy and former war hero who had later fallen foul of the regime, seemingly because of his Jewishness. “For me, what was really interesting was that he had had to deal with all the consequences of war,” says Wolski. “He had to deal with the major events and movements that happened in Europe in the 20th Century, like fascism, Stalinism…”

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.

When scientists Zhengli Shi, Linfa Wang and Peter Daszak linked the 2003 SARS outbreak to a bat cave in China, they wanted to warn the world of the dangers of a new pandemic. Instead, when COVID-19 closed the world down in 2020, they somehow ended up being blamed. It was a classic “Cassandra story” in which the messengers caught all the flak. “In a media landscape built on simplification and soundbites, it’s so f****** difficult for science to answer,” Frei tells BDE.

For almost half a century, legendary New York photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank diligently captured his own life on film and video. But the footage was never seen, because for years it sat in the basement of his New York apartment, collecting dust. Until now. “We had it transferred professionally to high resolution files and it was like unlocking a time capsule. It's a visual diary of his life over those decades,” director Laura Israel told the professional audience in Nyon.

In Grzegorz Piekarski & Natalia Pietsch’s 70-minute doc world-premiering in Nyon, shepherdess Rengin and barber Burak are forced out of their homes in the historic Kurdish town of Hasankeyf as Turkish plans to build a dam go ahead. In the subsequent flooding, millennia-old traditions and ways of life will be eradicated. “These are strong words, but we are talking about cultural genocide,” co-director Natalia Pietsch tells BDE about the devastation suffered by the town’s inhabitants.

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.”

With the madness of March behind us (at least in terms of the number of doc fests on offer), April seems altogether calmer and more introspective, a state of mind that is reflected in the Visions du Réel 2025 programme. “We are much more focusing on cinematic and artistic approaches that suggest, I guess, a different kind of ambition. Basically, we are looking for shapes and ideas, authors and personal approaches more than topics,” says Emilie Bujès, Artistic Director.

Clarisa Navas' The Prince of Nanawa won the Grand Prize in the International Feature Film Competition, while Bani Khoshnoudi's The Vanishing Point won the Jury Prize in the Burning Lights Competition. The Jury Prize in the National Competition was won by Les Vies d'Andrès of Baptiste Janon and Rémi Pons. The The Audience Award went to Cutting Through Rocks by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni. All prizes…

When the US Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed in 1982, the US Department of Energy came up with six potential sites where 70,000 metric tonnes of the highest-level nuclear waste could be buried. This was material that was going to be toxic for thousands of years - so not the stuff any American actually wanted in their backyard. Casey Carter’s new doc tells the story of what newscasters called "a competition no-one wants to win" - the one to become the permanent home of the country’s radioactive nuclear waste.