Visions du Réel 2022

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.

As unlikely it sounds, Dogwatch is a delight to watch, an aesthetically pleasing and almost poetic observation of three men working as armed guards on ships traversing pirate-infested waters.

In 2022 Visions du Réel promises to explore the “wide spectrum” of documentary and non-fiction, Artistic Director Emilie Bujès tells BDE on the eve of the festival’s live 53rd edition. “We have a mission to pull strings in all directions as far as possible.” Of the 124 films in official selection, 84 are world premieres and 15 are international premieres. Films will compete in International Feature, Burning Lights, Swiss and International Medium/Short-length competitions.

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.

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.

Filmmaker Frederique De Montblanc talks to Business Doc Europe about her study of high-powered women in industry, the dilemmas they face and the hurdles De Montblanc herself had to overcome to make her film. “It was hard to tell [the banks] that I wanted to do a series of intimate portraits of women. They don’t get that. In some cases, I had to cancel shootings because in some cases the banks weren’t helping at all. Actually, they were working against us.”