Visions du Réel 26

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.

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.

Shot in the Persian Gulf, the feature doc Heat, directed by Jacqueline Zünd, deals with one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. “It's like a magnifying glass amplifying all these differences, especially the economic and social disparities,” Zünd tells Business Doc Europe. “Because there is a certain [very high] temperature, rich people do not leave their houses anymore… Meanwhile, the poor people are dying out there, or maybe having heatstroke, while delivering food at noon when they call for lunch. It's really crazy.”

The logistics sound daunting: 40 cinematographers and more than 300 people filming in 64 locations combined to create the collective portrait of a single July night in Ukraine. In her epic new film, Olga Chernykh draws together imagery of everything from nightclubs to air raids, from soldiers on the frontline to women giving birth, from passengers aboard a train about to head east to wildlife coming out after dark. "It’s about resilience and strength, of course, and about love - love for each other and love for the country,” Chernykh tells BDE.

Ross McClean’s intimate and insightful film offers up a frank and unsentimental look at a young man (Ryan) who is a regular within the prison system, accepting of how institutionalised he has become, but who also sees the possibility of another alternative life, and one that does not entail crime and subsequent incarceration. Of all things, this new life would involve sheep.

In her new film, French director Emma Boccanfuso follows the remarkable Mother Courage-like Sueli, a flamboyant local woman living in a Rio favela and fighting to hold her extended family together, while running her own makeshift bar and enjoying plenty of gossip with the neighbours. “I very quickly found myself propelled into the heart of the home and the intimacy of this family,” the director tells BDE. “From there, a deep friendship was born, to the point that I have been coming back several times a year to see them for the past ten years.”

In her short film Une chambre à elles A Room of Their Own), three women, Claude-Emmanuelle, Régina and Nicole, apply make-up before going out. As we watch, all three reflect on intimate aspects of their lives, from suicide to gender transition to the strength that can be derived from ‘pink femininity’. “I don’t wear make-up myself, but I’ve always been drawn to this ritual,” the director tells BDE. “These are often moments when confidences emerge naturally, when intimate stories are more easily shared.”

When Dutch filmmaker Jona Honer first visited China, he soon worked out that the easiest way to connect with the young and extremely affluent sub-strata of Chinese society was through their favourite nightclubs. He was also fascinated by the rituals of capitalism, which resembled more a religion in terms of its structure and the social support it offered. “They [the club goers] create their own symbols, maybe without knowing it consciously,” Honer tells BDE. “Every religion has its own symbols. They create their own value system…it’s more than a night out.”

We don’t know why the prisoners within the high-security Volterra jail are serving time, but under the supervision of Venice Golden Lion-winning theatrical director Armando Punzo, who has entered the prison every day for the past 38 years, they are producing wonderful theatre. In Dentro, French director Elsa Amiel chronicles the process. “I wanted to capture the atmosphere of the prison — a place once known as one of Italy’s worst, transformed through theatre into a place of avant-garde creation,” she tells Business Doc Europe.

A quietly compelling and measured portrait of a life marked by migration, displacement, and crime, From Dawn to Dawn (La noche de la infancia)—the debut feature of Xisi Sofia Ye Chen—offers an unsentimental look at an older brother who, after operating for years as a gangster, resolves to confront his past and consider a profound change of direction.