Visions du Reel’s Emilie Bujès on why the festival is a platform for new documentary talent

This year’s documentary film festival Visions du Réel (VdR), running April 12-21, in the Swiss city of Nyon features a larger than usual number of features by first-time filmmakers.

The international feature film competition alone has 10 debuts including striking work such as Mother Vera, about a nun in Belarus, from UK directors Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson, and Okurimono, by Canadian director Laurence Lévesque, about her stepmother’s return journey to Nagasaki.

“We are very happy,” says festival director Emilie Bujès. “We believe it is one of our missions is to help new talents entering the international circuit.”

VdR received 3,300 submissions this year which the programming team needed to winnow down to the selection of around 165 titles.

“It’s a very, very intense process,” Bujès says of the period in late December and early January when the ‘core selection’ is being made and the programmers are spending 12 hours a day watching films. 

On principle, Bujès “would never watch a film on a iPhone or an iPad, that’s for sure.” The programming team do their best to respectful of the work that has gone into the documentaries.

Most of the films the festival receives are “relevant and interesting in different ways”, she says. There’s an effort to ensure each section, from the main competition to Burning Lights, is “balanced in terms of forms, approaches, topics, countries,and gender”.

 This year’s opening film is As The Tide Comes byJuan Palacios, co-directed by Sofie Husum Johannesen and sold by Lightdox. It unfolds on a tiny island of only 27 inhabitants in the Dutch Wadden Sea. Climate change and rising sea levels are putting their traditional way of life at risk.

“It’s about finding a film that’s relevant, interesting, in tune with the world but also for us it is important that it is cinematic,” Bujès say of the title that will launch the festival “It is light, fun, but with serious aspects behind it.”

Various high-profile guests will attend this year’s festival. Bujès takes particular pride in hosting Chinese master Jia Zhangke, whose credits include both dramas such as Still Life and A Touch Of Sin, and various documentaries.

“He hasn’t been in a festival since 2019,” Bujès says of the Golden Lion winning director. She has been on a charm offensive for many years to get him to come to the festival. “My favourite strategy is to try again and again and again,” she says of her many overtures toward Zhangke.

“He is a very interesting figure because of the coherence he creates in a body of work that is very eclectic, the fact that he has done classical documentaries and genre films. And even in his early fictions, there is a huge documentary dimension.” 

Also giving a masterclass is France’s Alice Diop, likewise a director who makes both documentaries and fiction, including her award-winning 2022 legal drama Saint Omer.

A third special guest is John Wilson, the idiosyncratic US filmmaker behind doc series How to With John Wilson.

“I love the fact that it is comedy,” Bujès says of the series. “It is very hard to make comedy both in fiction and non-fiction and he [Wilson] does it very, very well.”

Conflict

Ukrainian titles feature prominently in the selection at a time when the world’s gaze has partly turned away from the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and towards the devastation in Gaza. The main competition includes Maria Stoianova’s Fragments Of Ice, about the director’s father, an ex-Soviet skating champ who travelled extensively in “free” western countries, recording his trips on video tapes.

Fragments Of Ice was one of the first films the festival selected. “It’s an incredible film because it is composed only of home movies that the father of the director shot,” says Bujes. “It’s also very interesting as a backdrop of what is happening today.”

Also screening in the competition is In Limbo, directed by Alina Maksimenko. It follows the director as she moves back in with her parents in their isolated village after the Russian invasion of February 2022.

“There are many films that have been produced from Ukraine over the past two years and many are really excellent. We had more that we could have selected,” Bujès reflects.

Bujès believes all the titles in the international competition have qualities to attract international distributors, while the Burning Lights selection should catch the eye of more adventurous programmers and buyers. She is proud of the 50:50 gender split in directors throughout this year’s programme, something that has happened organically. 

“We don’t work with quotas. I would never take a film from a woman because it is a female director and if I think it is less good than another film by a man,” she explains.

Recent months have seen intense debate and protests at film events from IDFA to the Berlinale about the role of festivals during periods of huge political upheaval.

“It’s a very difficult and painful moment and I would certainly understand if people want to express themselves, to demonstrate or whatever,” says Bujes. “I have no idea if that will happen but in general, our role is to offer space for films to be watched and discussed. For me, it is quite important that people will want to watch those films, listen to the stories and perhaps get another feeling of the realities of different places.”

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