Visions du Réel 24

On April 15 Visions du Réel awarded the 2024 Prix d’honneur to Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke. French filmmaker Claire Denis, Guest of Honour at the Festival in 2020, paid tribute to him while the prize itself was awarded by Carlo Chatrian, International Feature Film Competition Jury member and former Artistic Director of the Berlinale.

A leading figure in independent Chinese cinema, and contemporary cinema more broadly, Jia Zhang-Ke will present a masterclass while the festival will screen a retrospective of his films. “The 55th Visions du Réel (12-21 April) will be my first trip to Europe after these four years. I feel like embracing the world again, as excited as a child about to go on a long trip for the first time. I am heading to Nyon, for cinema that reveals the world as it really is."

If you go to Niscemi in Sicily, you’ll find both picturesque woodland and, very incongruously, a US base housing a Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite ground station. Right in front of it lives Valentina, a woman in her 20s, together with her parents. “In the beginning, it [the film] started as a story about the base. But then, as I was discovering that the fight was gone and there was no hope anymore, I met the family. I found their resistance [to the base] very interesting,” director Francesca Scalisi tells BDE.

A protest film rather sweetly dressed-up as a science-fiction discourse, Tobias Nölle’s essay film intriguingly offers up the notion of an android arriving in modern-day Germany from a future in which humans no longer exist, determined to discover what happened to machines and also try and talk with the King of the Humans.

When he was growing up in Mozambique, Pierre-François Sauter used to go on holiday to Cape Verde. Years later, the Swiss filmmaker has returned to the islands to make his stark new feature documentary Far West (world-premiering at Visions Du Réel). The film, which has almost no dialogue, focuses on two characters, Angela and Jair, as they try to eke out an existence in their fishing village in a rocky, volcanic corner of Cape Verde.

In visually breathtaking fashion, and full of wonderfully human, slightly absurdist observations, As the Tide Comes In tells the story of the Danish Wadden Island of Mandø through the character of Gregers, its last farmer resident. At the same time, it is, inevitably, a story about climate change and humankind’s fight for - and against - nature.

We Are Inside, which world-premiered in Nyon, explores the father-daughter relationship between poet Mustapha and his filmmaker daughter Farah Kassem in all its complexity. As she tells Business Doc Europe, director Kassem wanted “to create situations where both our mediums could meet, my camera and his poetry.”

Sixteen new Swiss projects plus one Swiss minority co-pro will be presented across the VdR-Industry programmes in 2024. These are in addition to the 25 Swiss (co)productions that feature in the festival’s official selection. The subject of the Switzerland Meets… event this year are the Austria and German doc industries, during which co-production and networking opportunities between professionals from the featured countries will be examined.

Mother Vera, which world-premieres in Nyon, follows the eponymous protagonist, a charismatic former heroic addict who had lived in an Orthodox monastery in Belarus for 20 years. “I felt very drawn to her quest,” co-director Embleton reflects on her subject. “She wants to experience all of life, and yet she was in this monastery.”

In trying to get to the roots of her childhood traumas, filmmaker Maka Gogaladze lays bare the soul of her Georgian nation. What at first appears to be an ego-documentary turns out to be a beautiful portrait of the Georgian mentality and its cultural richness.