Visions du Réel 2022

When director Peter Entell’s father was 75, he sent his son a letter suggesting he should make a film about old people. “It’s fun to be old,” was one possible title his father suggested. Entell took his father at his word. The documentary he made, premiering in the Burning Lights competition at Visions Du Reel, doesn’t portray old age in quite the way the father first anticipated. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

Elizabeth: A Portrait In Parts, a Special Screening at Visions Du Réel, may seem an uncharacteristic project for the late Roger Michell, director of the romcom Notting Hill. It’s an entirely archive-based documentary looking at the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II. However, as its producer Kevin Loader points out to BDE, it has many of the same qualities as his feature films.

The new director of the Sarajevo Film Festival Jovan Marjanović (Bosnia and Herzegovina), the winner of last year's Grand Prix Jessica Beshir (Faya Dayi) and Beatrice Fiorentino, General Delegate of Venice Critics’ Week, will deliberate over the 16 International Feature Comp selections before handing over the Grand Jury Prize and Special Jury Award, worth CHF 20,000 and CHF 10,000 respectively. Read on for all section juries and prizes.

Director Beckermann advertised a casting call for a film based on a notorious Viennese pornographic novel from 1906. Her subsequent doc sees 75 men confronted with excerpts from the book. “I made the film also as a kind of test. How will people - the public and society - react to it? Where do we stand today? Is it possible today to show such a film, or will there be wokeness against it?” she asks BDE.

Edited from countless home movies, Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend not only shows her best friend Kimi’s descent into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.

In his feature doc No Place for You in Our Town (screening in Visions du Réel Latitudes and presenting at Movies That Matter, following its world premiere at CPH:DOX), Bulgarian director Nikolay Stefanov returns to his home town of Pernik to look at the lives of some of football club FC Minyor’s most die-hard supporters, who are part of a once-prospering, now struggling, mining community.

An elegant and insightful blend of childlike art, music and observation helps elevate Vida Dena’s documentary My Paper Life (Ma vie en papier) to something rather special, and helps deliver a thoughtful and warm immersion into the thoughts, memories and present-day realities for a Syrian family who have escaped the war and are now living in Belgium.

Visions du Réel 2022 has announced that the Special Guest of its 53rd edition running 7 to 17 April 2022 will be Kirsten Johnson (Dick Johnson is Dead, 2020 Sundance US Doc Jury Award winner) who will present a retrospective of her films as well as a selection of films to which she has contributed, which includes Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour (2014, co-producer and camera).

Dutch co-producer Janneke van de Kerkhof of Submarine explains why the company boarded Chinese filmmaker Lei Lei’s highly expressive animation documentary, supported by the Hubert Bals Fund, pitched at CineMart 2017 and selected for Visions du Réel Latitudes. The film which tells the life of the director’s family during the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. Van de Kerkhof spoke before film’s world premiere at IFFR.

A Holy Family offers an engaging, at times very moving, examination of a family that has struggled to find its balance, but which opens up to eventually appreciate and even understand each other. Review by Mark Adams.