Visions du Réel '23

French filmmaker Geoffrey Lachassagne felt an affinity with US novelist William Faulkner from the word go. “This guy was actually talking about us…it was something I had never felt in French literature,” he tells Business Doc Europe. “Faulkner managed to capture something which rang true about my own country although he was speaking about a country with such a different history and situation.”

It’s a horrible kind of limbo. You’ve lived your entire life in a country; you’ve studied there, paid taxes and maybe even bought a house and started a family. All the time, though, you know you can be deported. This is the plight that faces the “dreamers,” the estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants brought to the US as kids. Filmmakers Stéphanie Barbey & Luc Peter explain their new film. to BDE.

If filmmaker Alan Zhang had the intention of expunging the lines between reality and fiction and leaving us pondering on the need for such lines, then she has succeeded in her quite brilliant debut This Woman. Both the film and its protagonist, as well as the director herself, leave you guessing about the veracity of what you have just seen - and whether or not it really matters.

Look through the range of subjects covered in the films of Swiss director Jean-Stéphane Bron (who was the subject of a VdR Masterclass April 27) and it’s hard, at least at first glance, to see how all the work fits together. “The question that remains at the end of the film gives me the idea for the next movie,” Bron explained to BDE how his documentaries are far more closely linked to one another than they may appear.

The partly animated documentary Behind the Lines, world premiering in Visons du Réel Grand Angle Competition, shows the professional and personal life of Syrian female political cartoonist Amani Al-Ali, who uses her powerful pen to fight both war and patriarchy.

The winners of the professional section of VdR-Industry were unveiled during the award ceremony Wednesday 26 April. Hosted for the first time by Sophie Bourdon, VdR-Industry welcomed 1,600 professionals representing nearly 80 countries, a similar number to the record 2022 edition. More than 500 individual meetings were held over three days. All award winners follow…

A brutally moving examination of the destruction Russia is leaving behind in Ukraine, When Spring Came to Bucha sees filmmakers Mila Teshaieva and Marcus Lenz enter the small Ukrainian city to film the devastation and optimism that defines the community after 35 days of siege and brutal combat that ended after the Russian military withdrew on March 31 2022.

A beautifully immersive and mesmeric, if a little slow-moving, examination of the cycle of grasshopper harvesting in Uganda, Grasshopper Republic works both as an analysis of a ramshackle and potentially dangerous makeshift industry and an intimate examination of the life of the grasshopper.

Filmmaker Sara Dolatabadi has had the good fortune to be the daughter of one of Iran’s most revered writers, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi. In her lyrical and delicate, yet powerful, film she patiently crafts a loving portrait of the great man from personal observations and memories, and written works that underline his incredible talent, intellect and profound knowledge of the human condition.

In her new film Les Oubliés de La Belle Étoile (The Lost Boys Of Mercury), Clémence Davigo tells a truly shocking story about how kids staying in a Catholic correctional facility half a century ago were beaten and humiliated by the priests in charge. The kids are now in late middle age. They want answers as to why they were treated in such brutal fashion. Davigo talks to BDE.