Visions du Réel 26

Three courageous women explore their sexual longings, and open up to their vulnerabilities. Each is interesting enough to have been the subject of her own documentary (which would have been more desirable). Nevertheless, all three deserve recognition for the courage with which they have welcomed us into their midst. That is strength - and whatever it is they’re looking for, they have already found something within themselves which most of us will probably never possess.

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.

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.

Didier, the central character in The Echo Of The Herd (La voix du troupeau) is like one of those sad-eyed clowns you see in old silent movies. Deaf since birth and still mourning the loss of his brother Claude, he looks for solace in his work on a cattle farm in Auvergne. Now well into middle-age, he still takes a child-like joy in tending the animals and building fences - but when the cattle suffer, so does he. The director pairing of Matthias Joulaud and Lucien Roux discuss their film with Business Doc Europe.

Amsterdam/Warsaw-based director Piotr Pawlus and Dutch-based producer/co-writer Ruoyao Jane Yao discuss their new collaboration, selected for International Competition at Visions Du Réel, about the everyday lives of Ukrainians whose existences have been turned upside down by the full-scale Russian invasion. “The camera was my eyes,” says Pawlus. “It was very important to get very pure and natural moments. Also, listening. That was the main goal.”

Stuck in Berlin after the pandemic, artist and filmmaker Viv Li, who comes from solid, traditional stock back in Beijing, decided to embrace the German capital’s ‘alternative’ culture scene. Her resulting (mis)adventures are as hilarious as they are poignant, especially when seen in counterpoint to her sober, albeit loving, family life back home. “I realised that there is less and less of ‘binary’ in how we live. There are a lot of differences, but in the end, we're the same,” she suggests to Business Doc Europe.

The German filmmaker discusses his new documentary about Germany’s shocking colonialist legacy in Namibia, and how a certain type of latter-day German tourist still makes the local people feel very uncomfortable. As we see in the film, they may seem like genial westerners but they don’t even try to hide their prejudices. “People being racist is something that to me is no surprise at all,” Jonas Spriestersbach tells BDE.

Six new Swiss doc projects, ripe for selection at festivals during 2026, will be presented April 22 in Nyon to industry professionals from the international sales, distribution and finance sectors, as well as festival programmers from across the globe. Thirteen more will be presented within the Prix RTS and newly established Migros Culture Percentage Story Lab. What’s more, there’s a hatful of Swiss films across the festival’s competition and non-competitive sections. Swiss Films documentary topper Charlotte Ducos puts BDE in the picture.

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s feature doc Cover-Up tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh and his relentless investigative reporting - from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, from Nixon and Watergate to the sabotage of the Nord Stream platform. “He was, I think, the most important voice of dissent in national security reporting,” co-director Poitras, who is VdR Industry Special Guest in 2026, tells BDE. Poitras is joined in interview by co-director Mark Obenhaus.

Outgoing Artistic Director Emilie Bujès talks to Business Doc Europe about her ninth and final edition in charge of one of Europe’s leading festivals for non-fiction and hybrid cinema. Under her charge, the festival has emphasised “the cinematic experience first and foremost,” she tells BDE. “But at the same time, I truly believe in the power of creating bridges, spending one hour and a half with somebody looking at things the way they are looking at them, and understanding what they want to share beyond the aesthetic experience - a common life, a common present, a common moment, a common history.”