“We have lost a little bit the habit of organizing a festival,” admits Visions du Réel Artistic Director Emilie Bujès before doors open on the 2022 edition, but she places any sense of apprehension into context – there are considerably greater pressures being suffered elsewhere in the world. Also, the festival has learned from the difficult stress of the two online editions in 2020 and 2021 held during the pandemic. This year, the festival is a distinctly live event. “Yes, we are stressed again, but it’s a more joyful stress, I have to say,” she says.
That said, there is still the business of staging Switzerland’s leading doc event, and enticing audiences into the auditoria. Right now, sales of film passes are looking very good, Bujès says, but she is very curious to see what ticket purchase habits are like post-lockdown. (There are currently no number restrictions within Swiss auditoriums, nor a demand for quarantine in the event of Covid infection.)
Of the 124 films in official selection, 84 are world premieres and 15 are international premieres. Sixty-five are features, of which 35 are debuts. Films will compete in International Feature, Burning Lights, Swiss and International Medium/Short-length competitions. In total, 160 films from 58 countries will screen during the fest. More than 3000 films were submitted for consideration, all of which were assessed closely by the six programmers, alongside Bujès herself.
In terms of themes across the submissions, Bujès notes that Covid wasn’t so much in evidence (that was more the case in 2021) but that films about the (not unrelated) subject of “returning home” are more prevalent. These include the likes of A Holy Family (Elvis A-Liang Lu, Taiwan/France), Remainders (Raúl Capdevila Murillo, Spain), Calvinia (Rudi van der Merwe, Switzerland) and Don’t Worry About India (Nama Filmcollective, Switzerland/Germany/India) among others. “Somehow COVID changed our relation to our families, to where home is and how you deal with everyday life,” she explains of the theme.
The festival programme also features a higher number of what Bujès refers to as “sci-fi, dystopic” films, citing (among many) Swiss Hugo Radi’s 13-minute Initial (Med/Short Comp), Maximiliano Schonfeld’s UFO film Luminum (Burning Lights Comp) and two films by Lithuanian Emilija Škarnulytė (Burial in Burning Lights Competition and Aphotic Zone in Med/Short Competition.)
“We are very much interested in keeping up to date with contemporary non-fiction filmmaking,” says Bujès, which is “very, very open and adventurous and emancipated from any narrow definition of what documentary used to be thought to be… [The festival] is about having a very wide spectrum.”
Visions du Réel 2022 is also presenting a series of five Morning Talks, during which filmmakers are invited to present their films from the programme and discuss their relevance to contemporary cinema, centred around specific questions that link them or, alternatively, divide them. Topics will include the issue of territory (geographical, imaginary or mental), the practices that “enrich, stretch, challenge, deconstruct and reconstruct documentary film” by people coming rather from the contemporary art field, and the notion of “staging’ in direct cinema. In the online discussion focused on the place of documentary in A-class and prestigious festivals, panelists include Frédéric Boyer (Artistic Director of the Tribeca Film Festival), Eva Sangiorgi (Director of the Viennale) and Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan from the Venice Film Festival, among others.
“It’s about creating a discursive framework for the films,” says Bujès. “It’s also about thinking about young people and making sure that we are allowing them to discover those forms and be aware that they exist, and that there is a place they can find them.”
Swiss films are prominent, as in previous years, with two in International Feature Competition (Like an Island by Tizian Büchi and My Old Man by Steven Vit, both world premieres) and another two in Burning Lights Competition (Getting Old Stinks by Peter Entell and Ghost Fair Trade by Laurence Bonvin and Cheikh Ndiaye, which are also world premieres).
There is also the Swiss Competition of 13 films which Bujès describes as particularly “strong” in 2022, characterised by youth and the use of Switzerland as a location. “They are very young filmmakers addressing society’s issues, directors that are in connection with the world and to where they are in it.” The competition will be presided over by an internationally-minded jury, comprising Senegalese/Belgian filmmaker Katy Léna Ndiaye, Swiss producer Olivier Zobrist and Czech programmer and critic Martin Horyna.
In 2022 Visions du Réel will pay tribute to the Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio by awarding him its Honorary Award. The doc fest will present a selective retrospective of his films (both fiction and doc) as well as the Swiss premiere of Bellocchio’s latest film Marx Can Wait (2021). This year’s Atelier (retrospective and public Masterclass) is dedicated to Algerian director Hassen Ferhani (143, rue du Désert, 2019) who, in the space of ten years, has established himself as one of the leading architects of the resurgence of Algerian cinema. The third guest of the 53rd edition of the fest is the American filmmaker and cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (Dick Johnson is Dead, 2019) who will be in Nyon to present a retrospective of her films, as well as a selection of the films to which she has contributed as cinematographer, which include Laura Poitras’ The Oath, 2010.
For Bujès, balance among the festival’s special guests was a core consideration. “It is always essential that the three of them together say something. It’s like having a picture and you want three different colours that together create something else. That’s always a puzzle for me, to say ‘okay, so we’re inviting this person, and this person, and this person.’ If one says no, then we have to change everything because we want to make sure that there are different approaches, different styles, different generations, different countries and different genders. We are very, very honoured that they are all attending.”
