Visions du Réel 26

When Sabine Fayoux Cantillo took over as Visions du Réel Head of Industry last autumn, the former Associate Director of Program at Chicken & Egg Films in New York was, in a sense, simply coming home. “When this opportunity came up, it was a no-brainer to return to a festival which has meant a lot to me in my career as a documentary worker…and to raise my child in my childhood home,” she tells BDE.

In Nyon, the producer/director team of Johnny Brewin and Laura Plancarte presented their project Boom!, the story of George and Sonia, a boxing couple in West London. The pair run a successful gym. They’ve got kids and are very much in love. They are also hyper competitive. “We are chasing the rush,” notes director Plancarte, who identifies closely with her subjects. “Obviously, I don’t put myself at risk like they do. But as an independent filmmaker, you need to do 10 roles yourself…and it is exhausting. Why do I choose this [as a career]? I am the same as them…I cannot think about everything else!”

Melbourne-based Chinese director Vee Shi may have set out to make a fictionalised account of the lives of his parents, but the resulting film is as viscerally verité as one can imagine, telling of an unhappy marriage, domestic abuse and having to deal with parental illness and financial struggle. “It's not 100% factual information, but it's an accurate representation of the emotional truth,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

This truly eye-opening film observes the proceedings in India’s first women-led Islamic court, highlighting the (still) astonishingly unequal status of women in India, but also the powerful and unstoppable way in which women are striving to secure justice. The film dismantles clichés about Muslim women as defenceless victims and Islam as a misogynistic religion. For these women are, in fact, taking religious law into their own hands as a powerful weapon against male dominance.

The 16 films competing for this year’s Doc Alliance Awards were announced April 15. Each of the seven European documentary festivals that make up the Doc Alliance network, together with this year’s guest festival GAIFF, the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, has put forward one short and one feature-length documentary from its previous programme. The Doc Alliance Award will be presented on 19 May in Cannes during the Doc Day Lunch at the Marché du Film.

Visions du Réel unveiled April 22 the winners of the 24th edition of VdR–Industry. More than CHF 80’000 in cash and in-kind prizes were awarded to 12 projects during the awards ceremony in Nyon. The Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, which grants €20,000 to support international co-productions at an early stage, was handed to Uganda by Daniel Mann. The final visions sud est Award, which has long encouraged independent film production in countries with low production capacities with a CHF 10'000 prize, went to Job 1:21 by Samuel Suffren.

Comme un château fort is less about mourning, more a form of mourning itself. Lou Colpé’s debut feature seems especially worthwhile for those of us who have lost loved ones or whose friends recently have. It shows how silence and presence are key to providing the support we need where words often fail.

It is well known that in space, nobody can hear you scream, but in the case of the astronauts on the 1973 NASA Skylab mission, nobody could hear their demands for better working conditions either. Everything the crew did was measured by their controllers in Houston who wanted as much data as possible about how humans coped in space - and didn’t care a jot for their well-being. In his new feature doc, nominated by Visions du Réel for the Doc Alliance Prize, UK doccer Graeme Arnfield investigates the incident further. He reports in to BDE.

From April 27 to May 1, 23 participants from 13 countries across the Mediterranean and MENA region will gather in Ajaccio, Corsica for a five-day workshop led by Alexandre Cornu and Diana El Jeiroudi. “At a time when unjust and devastating wars continue to affect parts of the Arab world, we believe it is more essential than ever to support documentary projects and voices from the region, and to foster meaningful collaboration and co-production between Western Asia, Europe and the Mediterranean,” organisers write.

My Skin And I, the new project from artists and filmmakers Milton Guillén and Fiona Guy Hall, is generating buzz even before its completion. It won two awards at VDR Industry this week after being presented in the works in progress section, and has already secured funding from both US and European sources. “The project really lives in this space where the political intersects with the personal and [looks at] how these two aspects of our lives are fundamentally intertwined,” Guy Hall tells BDE.