Festival will open with Kinshasa Symphony on April 15.

Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer’s Kinshasa Symphony will be the opening film on April 15 of this year’s Visions du Réel International Documentary Film Festival in Nyon on the shores of Lake Geneva.

This last edition of Visions du Réel under festival director Jean Perret, who will be heading up the film department at Geneva’s School of Art & Design HEAD from September, has 30 world premieres of feature-length documentaries from around the world, including Miklos Gimes’ Bad Boy Kummer about the dubious interview techniques of the former celebrity journalist Tom Kummer, Jacqueline Zünd’s portrait of insomniacs in Goodnight Nobody, Wiktoria Szymanska’s homage to the avant-garde artists Themerson & Themerson, and Ali Razi’s Twenty Days That Shook Tehran.

The 20 titles selected for the International Competition include eight world premieres ranging from Ian Thomas Ash’s UK-Japanese co-production Jake, Not Finished Yet and Ilaan Klipper’s Sainte Anne, Hopital Psychiatrique through Marlene Rabaud and Arnaud Zajtman’s Kafka Au Congo to Sabine Gisiger and Beat Haner’s Guru-Bhaghvan, His Secretary & His Bodyguard.

The Competition will be judged by an International Jury composed of Spanish writer/academic Jordi Ballo; UK filmmaker Molly Dineen (winner of the Visions du Réel Grand Prix in 2008); Swiss writer Bernard Comment; and producer and former ARTE executive Thierry Garrel.

Other highlights lined up for the festival’s 16th edition include Ateliers dedicated to the filmmakers Alain Berliner and Wenguang Wu as well as a retrospective of short films made by the controversial and provocative UK artist Tracey Emin in the sidebar Reprocessing Reality.

The complete programme of films and associated industry events at Visions du Réel can be found at www.visionsdureel.ch.

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