Visions du Réel 25

While football is very much the driving force of Sarah Imsand’s engaging documentary Kevine and Fortune, at its tender and warm-hearted core is a friendship that is driven by mutual support, faith and determination – as well as a love of the beautiful game.

For years, Indigenous American Al Moon had been contemplating attending one of the annual reunions of the soldiers he served alongside in Vietnam. He had kept on putting it off. When he finally decided to go, filmmakers Ingold & Vivianne Perelmuter accompanied him, documenting his journey. “He wanted it but he feared it as well…the journey way deeper than the destination somehow,” Perelmuter tells BDE.

There is another world behind the wall. This could be one summary of Callisto Mc Nulty’s La Muraille, which reminisces with staff and patients about the Fontilles sanatorium in Alicante (opened in 1909), where lepers were housed, treated, and also locked away. Callisto Mc Nulty creates a quietly haunting reflection on how history – often painful, sometimes joyous, never truly past – echoes through the sanatorium, the surrounding landscapes and its inhabitants.

It’s easy to be reminded of the Jabberwocky or the Snark (mythical creatures in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense stories) by the Mokélé-Mbembé, the so-called “dinosaur of the Congo” that French cryptozoologist Michel Ballot has spent so long searching for in the jungles of Cameroon. Marie Voignier has already made one film about his idiosyncratic quest. Now, she is back with another, Anamocot, a world premiere in VdR’s International Feature Competition this week.

There is more than a touch of the magical realist about the Swiss/Argentinian The World Upside Down, a hybrid doc in which uncertainty ensues after a mysterious light-ball is expelled from the chest of farmer Omar, and as two housekeepers little by little assume permanent residency over the beautiful house that the owners have all but abandoned. “We were always fascinated by these topics - and also by things that are still very unexplainable to us humans,” co-director Leon Schwitter tells Business Doc Europe.

If there is one country that is punching well above its weight in doc terms, it is Norway, which has seen huge recent success with the likes of 2024 Sundance winners Benjamin Ree (Ibelin) and Silje Evensmo Jacobsen (A New Kind of Wilderness) through to this year’s Oscar win for No Other Land (a minority co-production), and much more besides. In Nyon, the Norwegian Film Institute is partnering with VDR-Industry April 8 on a WiP programme of docs ready for launch onto the international circuit. NFI’s Elisabeth Aalmo guides BDE through her selection.

This intriguing portrait of the chief of the most important Soviet intelligence network during World War II, the one which first informed Moscow about Hitler’s plans for attacking Stalingrad, is as fascinating as it is frustrating – which in turn makes it all the more fascinating. Was Leopold Trepper a Gestapo collaborator or a war hero? Or perhaps both?

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.

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.

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…”