March 2025 was a frenetic month for doc fests, with the likes of CPH:DOX, FIFDH and Movies That Matter addressing full-on the existential difficulties and uncertainties faced by the inhabitants of the planet.
The Nyon-based Visions du Réel (VdR) docfest will be no different, with Artistic Director Emilie Bujès stressing how her 2025 ‘frictions du réel’ approach acknowledges “a current moment in time where, in general, there is friction everywhere.”
But at VdR the aesthetic vibe is different. It is more contemplative, less agitated and better suited to meet a festival mandate looking to bridge the gap between doc and art, between doc and fiction. “We are much more focusing on cinematic and artistic approaches that suggest, I guess, a different kind of ambition. Basically, we are looking for shapes and ideas, authors and personal approaches more than topics,” Bujès tells BDE.
“Of course, in a world that is all the time creating more anxiety and stress, if you create a space for discussion, then the mood – the atmosphere – is going to be totally different,” she adds of the festival’s location by the waters of Lake Geneva. “The city of Nyon is smaller and allows us to create something that is more friendly. Although there is a very large attendance of professionals, it is an atmosphere that is more intimate and a bit more easy-going.”
Running 4-13 April, the 56th edition of Visions du Réel kicks off with the world-premiere of Christian Frei’s Blame, one of 31 Swiss (co)productions) in official selection. Across the board, 154 films will be presented, 88 of which are world premieres and a further 12 international premieres.
The restrictions imposed by the city’s limited geographical proportions seem as much a blessing as a curse as they instil a greater sense of “precision” within the programming, Bujès suggests. “There is no way that we can offer everything that CPH or IDFA is offering, and so our approach is to focus more precisely and to address a certain kind of cinema,” she says. “Hybridity is very much at the core of what we do.”
In 2025, no fewer than 57 countries are represented across all VdR sections. “With their unique and original languages, the films in the 2025 edition investigate various ways of translating reality, defying categorisation and flirting with a very wide range of styles, registers and genres,” Bujès described the programme when it was announced in March.
She further talks of a “trust contract” that exists between the festival and its highly savvy and cine-literate audience that is prepared to come from all over Switzerland (as well as far beyond Swiss borders) to indulge in the festival’s eclectic artistic offer.
The International Feature Film Competition includes films from as far afield as Mongolia, Australia, Slovenia, Cameroon and Argentina. “The Burning Lights competition is also conceived in the same spirit, with films hailing from China, Lebanon, Canada and Poland among others,” says the Nyon boss.
“We are internationally acknowledged as a place that is relevant and interesting to launch the career of a film,” she adds. “I think this is something that is very much inscribed in our DNA, both on the program and on the industry side, also with the many diverse initiatives that we have created over the past years.”
And then there are the 31 Swiss productions and co-productions on offer, as well as 15 new and advanced Swiss projects to be presented at VdR Industry.
“I believe that documentary is, I would dare say, the most important genre in Switzerland,” Bujès underlines, and is therefore very satisfied that the German-Swiss documentary, Blame by Christian Frei, is opening the festival. The film’s synopsis reads how, when the world is engulfed by the COVID-19 pandemic, three scientists who long predicted its arrival must battle not only the virus but also a wave of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and political blame that threatens to eclipse the truth.
Switzerland has four official languages; German, French, Italian and Romansh, and four corresponding linguistic regions. Visions du Réel itself is located in the French-speaking side of the country. For Bujès, the choice of Blame as the fest opener is of core cultural significance. “It is very important symbolically because there is an invisible border between the French-speaking and the German-speaking sides…but I’m very happy to say that there is no border for us. It’s a clear sign for the Swiss industry and audience that we want to represent all the regions, languages and cultures.”
The Swiss film Obscure Night – ‘Ain’t I a Child?’ by Sylvain George will world-premiere in International Competition. Coming in at just under three hours it is the closing chapter of director George’s trilogy on the policies of migration, as he accompanies street children of Morocco through the streets of Paris during a “complex age and ordeal, while Europe turns a blind eye.” Bujès describes it as “a film made with them [the refugees] and not just about them.”
Other prominent Swiss films include The Other World by Callisto McNulty – about a still operational sanatorium for leprosy patients in Spain – and the Swiss/Argentinian magical realist The World Upside Downby Agostina Di Luciano and Leon Schwitter, which Bujès describes as “very adventurous in its relation to fiction.”
Furthermore, twelve films will world-premiere in the festival’s National Competition, a section whose stature has increased greatly in recent years. “It used to be that the National Competition felt like a sidebar for the Swiss industry, but not anymore. That section is now allowing us to have a very strong Swiss offer.”
Key festival guests this year are Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck who will receive the Prix d’Honneur. Romanian Corneliu Porumboiu will be giving a masterclass on Saturday 5 April while British filmmaker and producer Asif Kapadia who will kick off the VdR-Industry days with a masterclass.
Among these esteemed males will be the revered Portuguese filmmaker and photographer Cláudia Varejão who is granted the festival’s prestigious Atelier slot. “It is a great pleasure to welcome a filmmaker for whom we, at Visions du Réel, have a great fondness, and whose work we greatly admire,” said Bujès in March. “Her strikingly coherent filmography is filled with moments of great sensitivity, combined with the precision of a photographer’s eye.”
Which are the attributes that Bujès and her colleagues strive to discover each year as they build their ground-breaking and eclectic programme of new docs.
