Visions du Réel 24

In Limbo (W zawieszeniu) is an intimate and insightful look at the war in Ukraine as seen from the viewpoint of a very particular family, and presented in very personal form. Set against other films from Ukraine which focus on frontline battles, the film is a welcome and moving glimpse into the lives of an ordinary family unit at the onset of the conflict.

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.

In Anas Zawahri’s feature doc debut, world-premiering April 16 in Nyon, residents of the shattered city of Homs (Syria) talk about their recent past that delivered little other than devastation within their lives and surroundings. “The film explores the idea of disclosure as a way to confront repressed emotions and heal from internal wounds that have not yet healed,” explains director Zawahri.

In the mountains of Afghanistan, a Hazara family seeks to uncover the truth behind the sudden death of their daughter, Zahra, who moved to Kabul to study. Co-director Yourish is from a Hazara background himself. “The story of Zahra, the story of the family, it doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens within the historical context. It is a continuation of the systematic discrimination against the Hazara people,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

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.

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.

A crowd-pleaser about pleasing a crowd, Orkhan Aghazadeh’s The Return of the Projectionist, world-premiering in Visions du Réel’s International Feature Film Competition, celebrates the rekindled love for the communal cinema experience in a small Azeri village, with the doc images themselves begging to be seen on the big screen.

In what feels like a cinematic counterpart to Ivo Andrić’s literary masterpiece The Bridge on the Drina, Swiss filmmaker Nicole Vögele’s The Landscape and the Fury, world-premiering in Nyon, juxtaposes the natural tranquility of the north-western Bosnian landscape with the fury of human struggles past and present, as modern-day refugees pass through areas still mined after the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

In Apple Cider Vinegar by Sofie Benoot, which world-premiered at VdR 2024, a kidney stone is the unusual prompt for a narrative that reflects on the often imperceptible connections between life and nature. It is a unique and almost unquantifiable film, but also an engaging and intriguing one.

The Ocean Viking has often been in the news in recent years. It is the ship chartered by humanitarian organisation SOS Méditerranée to rescue migrants fleeing by sea from Libya. It has been impounded, harassed by Libyan coast guard vessels and criticised by European politicians - but it has saved countless lives. Jean-Baptiste Bonnet talks to BDE about his new film for which he followed the ship for six weeks.