Visions du Réel director Emilie Bujès opens up to Business Doc Europe about the 2021 edition that welcomes back filmmakers, industry and specific audiences to Nyon. “Ideologically for us, this is a very important gesture,” she underlines of the festival’s first tentative steps towards normality.
Visions du Réel 2021 kicks off with a slightly reduced programme of 142 films (170 in 2020) but the event still includes a whopping 82 world and 16 international premieres. The hybrid edition welcomes back specific live audiences (professionals and press, film and art students, as well as kids), albeit in reduced numbers, with a limit of approximately fifty per auditorium.
The reason why world premieres constitute nearly 60% of the programme is, festival director Emilie Bujès points out, a determination on the part of her and her colleagues to “dig into the submissions,” which numbered more than 3000 this year.
“We assess the submissions very carefully and most of the program is composed of what we find there,” Bujès underlines. “It may sound cheesy but it really feels like gold digging when suddenly, after many hours of viewing, you find an incredible and unexpected gem. This is a fantastic feeling that all programmers share I think.”
“It is really about creating a line-up that is going to be exciting and interesting both for general audiences and professionals, and everything in-between,” she continues, adding how, “140 is still a good enough number for a festival of our size in order to express what we want to express. We reduced a little bit, but there are films that we wanted to show, and it would be have been heart-breaking to cut too much. So we are hosting the films we want to host. We can tell our story, give an insight and still offer both new films and older films.”
Furthermore Bujès feels a particular responsibility, maybe even more so in these straitened times, to filmmakers who are offering their new works to the festival, as well as to cineaste audiences now and in the future.
“That is pretty crucial for us, to make sure that we contribute to the diversity of the cinematic landscape with general audiences and with young people in particular,” she comments. “I used to teach at an art school and the students would say they didn’t know where to find content. They didn’t watch TV anymore and on Netflix you will only find ‘certain’ kinds of docs, we know that. ‘So how do we know where to start and look?’ they would ask.”
Bujès answers. “The festival is the machine that allows us to create a certain energy, in order to launch those films and make sure they exist…Then young people can decide whether they find them interesting or not, but at least they are aware that these cinemas exist.”
The international festival scene in 2020 was defined to a great extent by the collegial approach of doc events that were determined that business (and screenings) should continue despite the pandemic. This sense of unity is as apparent in 2021 as restrictions continue to play havoc with the festival calendar. Late April alone sees the compression and overlap of three major doc events; Visions du Réel, CPH:DOX and Hot Docs, with a raft of scheduled and rescheduled events following close on their heels.
How does Bujès feel about this enforced disruption? “Well, first it is exceptional,” she responds philosophically. “CPH:DOX contacted me and we had a very open dialogue about it, and they particularly said that they would go back to their usual dates next year. So we all have to understand what everybody is going through. It is not possible to do it another way.”
But the situation has thrown up logistical problems and constraints with the two festivals’ 5-day overlap. “Of course it is not super easy,” Bujès concedes, pointing to the VdR Grand Angle section which would, in the past, have screened films after their premiere at CPH:DOX. “But we have been collaborating very tightly. It has been a very fertile exchange in order to make sure that we all fight for the good of the films. So, for instance, we are sharing two world premieres of films screening in parallel. It was really about understanding how it is a very specific situation, how it is a specific year and we have to work together to make sure the films have the premieres they deserve.” The shared world premieres are Liesbeth de Ceulaer’s Holgut (Belgium) and Marion Neumann’s The Mushroom Speaks (Switzerland).
In its promotion, Visions du Réel underlines lyrically the themes that it looks to explore and embrace, such as “political fights, the body’s intimacy and power, the real places and the imagined landscapes.”
Bujès expands on this. “Those pathways are meant for audiences looking for points of entry in the Official Selection when they are not sure what to watch. They are not selection criteria and we are certainly not looking for any kind of topic in particular during the selection process. What is more essential for us in terms of programming is the idea of the author behind the camera, the feeling that no matter how “important” the topic may be – or not, indeed –, there is an ambition and urgency in telling the story, and working out how and why. It is really essential that there is an approach that feels not only relevant for the film but which feels really original, and generating a feeling [in the audience] of ‘okay, I knew about that, but I’ve never seen it told that way.’”
In 2021 Visions du Réel will pay tribute to French author, filmmaker and screenwriter Emmanuel Carrère by awarding him the prestigious Honorary Award (previously named the Prix Maître du Réel). The homage will include a masterclass, a ‘carte blanche’ of docs that inspired Carrère and a presentation of his documentary Retour à Kotelnitch (2003).
“This is really a way to make a political statement about the kind of filmmaking we are defending which I think is not so far removed from the way Emmanuel Carrère writes,” says Bujès. “How you clearly position yourself, include yourself, have a (first-person) writing that is embodied, that is not going to tell you something from a point of view that is yet to be defined. That is at the core of the cinema that we are defending.”
The festival will also host Mexican Tatiana Huezo Sánchez, a filmmaker with whom the festival has had ties for many years, and Italian director Pietro Marcello within the 2021 Ateliers programme.
Bujès cites autodidact Marcello’s Lost and beautiful (2015) as one of her top 20 films. “It feels like he is very intuitive in his approach to filmmaking, but in parallel there is something very straight and honest, something both very raw and very graceful, in the way the narrative is translated into visual sensual textures. The images not only serve what is being told, they intensify it. As for his very narrow relation to literature and poetics, it is fascinating and always consistent. I think he is a very important director and I am very happy and proud to welcome him.”
Of Tatiana Huezo Sánchez, Bujès tells how she conducted a Q&A with her at Berlinale in 2016 when an audience member asked how the director was able to cope with making films such as Tempestad, which deals with such heart-rending pain and violence.
“At this moment Tatiana became totally emotional and we had to wait because her tears were coming, and they were coming for me as well, and the interpreter was in the same situation. This is the kind of person she is and her films are very much her. They have a great sensitivity, an intimacy, an honesty. Also, the way she often interweaves sound and image that do not belong to each other creates a whole new dimension, very rich and fertile, opening her films to a much larger territory in the mind of those watching… I am very happy to participate in this [Visions du Réel] moment with her.”
