Visions du Réel 2022

SWISS FILMS Head of Festivals and Markets Andreas Bühlmann guides Business Doc Europe through the six new documentary projects offered up for consideration to the great and the good of the international sales, distribution, funding and festival community. The hybrid event takes place April 13 in Nyon.

Revered Italian director, screenwriter and producer Marco Bellocchio received April 11 the festival's highest honour before the Swiss premiere of his latest documentary, Marx Can Wait. Among the laudators were Emilie Bujès, artistic director of Visions du Réel, and Marco Müller, former director of the Venice FF and Locarno FF. On April 12 Bellocchio will give a public masterclass at Visions du Réel, which will also be live-streamed.

Though conventional in tone and structure, Steven Vit’s My Old Man also manages to be gently profound as it dwells on a childhood spent in a conventional family (not unlike countless ones encountered in Switzerland and elsewhere) and the director’s realisation that he doesn’t really know the often-absent father who would call from the other side of the world to say goodnight when he was a child.

Pulitzer Prize nominated US novelist Marianne Wiggins is the subject of the new doc world-premiering this week in the International Medium/Short competition in Nyon. This, though, isn’t the typical biographical portrait of an important writer. It’s more of a story about creativity in the face of illness; an intimate study of an artist trying to recover her full faculties after a devastating personal setback. Co-director Ressler talks to BDE.

An intriguing and languid blend of magical realism and observational documentary, Tizian Büchi’s Like An Island (L'îlot) presents the often enigmatic story of two men whose job is to watch over the area around the Vuachère, the burbling river running through a suburban neighbourhood in Lausanne (Switzerland).

As if the Balkans needs another country, and another set of borders... Meet Czech businessman and self-proclaimed ‘president’ Vít Jedlička who, in 2015, founded the ‘sovereign state’ of Liberland on an island on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia. In Isabella Rinaldi’s documentary, screening in VdR Medium/Short Competition, we also meet a happy Dutchman who has fully bought into the Liberland concept and two Tito-loving idealists who are dedicated to re-establishing a mini Yugoslavian state.

World premiering in Visions du Réel’s International Feature Film Competition, Éclaireuses follows two passionate teachers in Brussels who create their own little safe space for children – many of them refugees – who never went to school before. The doc may eschew analysis of wider pedagogical issues but shines a deserved light on two teachers who lovingly, patiently, and professionally take care of children who have fallen through the cracks of the system.

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.

Director Daniel Kemény tells Business Doc Europe about his Swiss Competition film Supertempo, shot in Rome in the early days of the pandemic, and featuring himself and his girlfriend. “We were three in there, Laura, me and the camera. The camera was always with us,” Kemény remembers of the tripartite relationship during lockdown.

Still not even 30 years old, Czech Adam Ondra is considered one of the greatest climbers who ever lived. In their feature doc world-premiering in VdR Grand Angle, fellow countrymen Jan Šimánek & Petr Záruba follow him over the course of three years, both in his private life and up in the mountains, as he prepares for the 2020 Olympics. The pair discuss their film with Business Doc Europe.