'Blame'

Source: Visions du Reel

‘Blame’

The 56th edition of Nyon-based Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel (April 4-13) is to open with the world premiere of Blame. Billed as “part investigation, part thriller,” Swiss director Christian Frei’s film is about three scientists battling the Covid pandemic and misinformation around it.

This will be preceded by a “pre-opening” screening the night before of Irish director Gar O’Rourke’s Sanatorium, a documentary set in a largely deserted health spa near Odesa in Ukraine where people come for health and fertility treatment as war rages nearby.

A record 57 countries are represented in this year’s selection across 154 films, of which 127 are new titles, 88 are world premieres and 28 are debut features. 

“We’re delighted that our selection once again reflects our openness to the world. The international feature film competition includes films from Mongolia, Australia, Slovenia, Cameroon and Argentina,” said artistic director Emilie Bujès. 

Renowned Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck is a guest of honour. He will be presenting his latest film Ernest Cole: Lost And Found, and will receive the festival’s prix d’honneur following a tribute by Orwa Nyrabia, who is leaving his role as artistic director of IDFA this summer.

Other guests of honour are Corneliu Porumboiu from Romania and Cláudia Varejão from Portugal, who will both give masterclasses.

Also attending will be UK filmmaker Asif Kapadia, who will give his own masterclass to open the VdR-Industry days (April 6-9) as well as introducing a 10th anniversary screening of his Amy Winehouse doc, Amy.

Among the festival jurors are filmmakers Eliza Hittman, Athiná Rachél Tsangári and Elene Naveriani, and Michael Stütz, co-director of film programming and head of the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival. 

The international feature competition contains several world premieres. These include Marie Voignier’s Anamocot, about a French adventurer’s quest to find the legendary Mokélé-Mbembé, an animal still unrecognised by zoologists and said to lurk deep within the Cameroonian forests, and Sylvain George’s Dark Night – “Ain’t I A Child?” which follows street children in Morocco.

Also screening in competition is Julien Elie’s Shifting Baselines. which too part in VdR–Industry in 2024, which set in a US community close to the SpaceX rocket launch base. 

Burning Lights, a competition strand dedicated to “novel, free, adventurous and contemporary perspectives in cinema”, also has its share of world premieres, among them the latest feature from renowned Polish author Tomas Wolski, The Big Chief, about Leopold Trepper, a former Red Army officer and hero of the anti-Nazi resistance who falls from grace as the spectre of anti-semitism returns to Polish society in the 1970s.

Also screening in Burning Lights are Casey Carter’s To Use A Mountain, looking at rural communities in the US threatened with having nuclear waste buried beneath them, and Curtis Miller’s A Brief History Of Chasing Storms, examining the phenomena of tornadoes through the prism of disaster capitalism.

Among the more intriguing titles in Vision du Reel’s national competition dedicated to Swiss productions is Laura Coppens’ Sediments, which follows the filmmaker’s conversations with her grandfather as he revisits uncomfortable moments in his past, including his experiences during the National Socialist period.

Other big names represented in the festival include prolific Ukrainian director Serge Loznitsa, presenting his new short Paleontology Lesson, about a class of kids from Kyiv visiting the Natural History Museum a year after Russia’s invasion.

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