My journey at Visions du Réel 2022

Elvis A-Liang Lu invites us into his family, step by step, gently. Gently and pitilessly. He does not hesitate to show the misfortunes of a family that believes intensely in fortune, be it through gambling or religion. Behind the observational eye of the documentarist grows a deeper and affectionate (filmic) bond with his family.

Elvis A-Liang Lu | TWN-FR 2022 | 90’
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Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd relance son voyage vertigineux des deuils impossibles qui mettent les victimes face à la nécessité d’une transcendance. L’homme se perd dans un paysage dur comme la pierre, ou bien se retrouve par une lumière qui plonge du Haut. Très inspiré par un excellent travail sur le son et le montage, Inner Lines manque de mesure en prenant parti dans le conflit du Haut-Karabagh : la paix ne passera jamais par la sympathie vers les nations et les nationalismes.

Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd | FR-BE 2022 | 87’
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Marusya Syroechkovskaya tells a cinematic love story where the human bond appears like a cry of resistance against a crescendo of self-destruction that mirrors the depressive conditions of Russian society. The gigantic work of editing by Qutaiba Barhamji performs a reconstruction that not only delivers a vibrating film – whose vibe is sustained by an impressive soundscape – but also constitutes a gesture of hope as such, at least insofar as it gives a constructive sense to a lost youth.

Marusya Syroechkovskaya | SE-NO-FR-DE 2022 | 103’ 
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Un œuvre de géographie au sens le plus large et le plus noble, où Tizian Büchi enquête sur un territoire qui réunit nature et société. Nous découvrons un quartier de Lausanne multi-ethnique donc typiquement suisse, à travers les yeux de deux vigiles, synthèse d’une société à la fois obsédée par le contrôle et la peur, et ouverte à l’attention pour l’autre et l’entraide. Les éléments de mise-en-scène introduisent un décalage qui est capable d’ouvrir l’observation documentaire à la contemplation. Quelques fois timide dans les transitions entre témoignages et explorations, L’îlot cherche dans les fragments du réel une organicité utopique.

Tizian Büchi | CH 2022 | 106’
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They are there, yet they would be somewhere else. 5 Dreamers and a Horse stages positively the desires of a society that otherwise could sink into a fatalist depression. Essentially anecdotic, the film casts its protagonists in order to give us a panoramic overview of the different societal issues in Armenia. Despite an almost didactic, demonstrative attitude, its details reveal a great cinematic sensibility.

Aren Malakyan, Vahagn Khachatryan | ARM-DE-CH-DK-GEO 2022 | 80’
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An airplane crosses the black sky: it is a moving image, but also a photo. Chun Hong Wang’s film plays wonderfully with the tension between the two media, between immobility and movement, the movement within the image, and the immobility of the filmic urban panorama. Also, between remaining and leaving, through a story of separation that mirrors the division of the Taiwanese society…

Chun-Hong Wang | TWN-FR 2021 | 79’
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Dismantling the largest atomic plant in ex-USSR is not only a gigantic technical challenge but also the occasion to recall the unsustainability in dealing with radioactive decay. Emilija Škarnulyte chooses a highly fascinating image language in order to highlight the visibility of ruins. Such insistence on the beauty of the images is definitely more than a redundant aestheticism, as it conveys a strongly sensible experience of abstraction that is especially pertinent for the both human and metaphysical theme of the burial of the dead.

Emilija Škarnulyte | LIT-NOR 2022 | 60’
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Le dispositif est clairement énoncé au début du film. Le reste n’est pas un récit mais une expérience, qui passe surtout à travers la magnifique piste sonore (Alberto Carlassare) – histoire d’intériorité – d’un film qui reste très (trop) homogène à l’image – question d’extériorité. Grâce à cette polarisation du son et de l’image, La Fiesta de San Fermín devient un bloc dur, parfois insupportable, dans lequel un monologue sonore, intérieur et existentiel, surplombe les abysses.

READ Calin Boto's review of the film HERE

Carlos Pardo Ros | ES 2022 | 67’
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Through a whirl of images we dive into Jan Kapr’s life and music. His smile and spirit are always present, surfing on private stories and the history of Czechoslovakia. The informative journey throughout his world is cemented by the flow of one operatic piece (!), collaged and composed with Kapr’s own music. A virtuoso and brilliant filmic choice. Breathless – for better or for worse.

Lucie Kralova | CZ-SLO 2022 | 91’
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There is a suggestive connection between the conservation/extinction of plants and the conservation/extinction of films, but Leandro Listorti also digresses onto the scientific categorisation of plants, another suggestive theme which we can but hardly connect to film. The questions of the dormant life, of the three-dimensional illustrations (of plants), or of the coincidence of visibility and destruction, amongst others, would each constitute a fascinating theme to be explored, between botanic and filmic, but they remain occasional digressions without development. Herbaria is a collection of titillating starting points, but misses going beyond an inventory of curiosities.

Leandro Listorti | ARG-DE 2022 | 83’
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The journey within the private huis clos is effectively long, and home is a jumble of bitter accusations and regrets. Wenqing Zhang reveals the horrible and universal truth of families that are unable to attain a liberating separation. Herself included in the image, she cannot decide between observational position and intervention. Moreover, she does not propose any filmic idea but the fidelity to an inapparent reality and an unbearable sound – a réel sans visions –: not enough to sustain a two hours long journey. It might be time to acknowledge that the ready-made aesthetic could also lead nowhere!

Wenqian Zhang | CHN 2022 | 123’
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Was it really necessary to embark onto a very long and unprofessional fiction in order to speak of a very well-known reality of discrimination and racism in bureaucratic France (that is supposed to speak for the whole of Europe)? In every sequence of the film we feel the good intentions of the script, and cannot but imagine the filmmaker wanting to tell us this and that. In declaring and not expressing, Europe is a didactic pamphlet, that finally glorifies the author himself as a militant humanist. An unexpected deception from one of the most mature voices of film documentary today.

Philip Scheffner | DE 2022 | 105’
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Jaime, almost entirely made of an iconic face, tells plausible and implausible stories at the same time: we are immediately attracted by the disturbed-yet-meaningful mind landscape that Jaime’s words convey. When we start to accept that iconic face in order to completely sink into his world and try to explore the thin line that divides reality and imagination, Franscisco Javier Rodriguez doubles the ambiguity of his character’s stories with the ambiguity of the filmic form. The synchronised and the non-synchronised play together, the face in front of us becomes only a character, he is actually an actor, an impersonator of Jaime. Delusion and deception play together, a second actor duplicates the first: with efficacious subtlety, Jaime uses all the cinematic tools in order to explore Jaime’s – and cinema’s – schizophrenia. Jaime himself retires as a recorded voice whose personal contours remain blurred. A sort of anti-voyeuristic documentary respect that makes the specialty of Jaime’s person even more vivid.

Franscisco Javier Rodriguez | BE 2022 | 37’ | Special Mention of the Medium Length & Short Film Competition
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Luka Papic’s art is to create an indeterminate documentary space where we give out any intention to understand, and focus on the main protagonist. His body becomes so particularly present, even if his movements draw equally an indeterminate wandering. The suspension of any teleological action expresses very well the disorientation of his having lost his beloved dog – this without being the only effective thread of Without. Therefore, the narrative uncertainties reveal a portrait almost exclusively determined by feelings and emotions. Expanding towards minor characters, tenderness and fascist elucubrations mix together crating a queer-and-real background that speaks of both actual Serbia and a specific eccentric individual. In the end, we remain with a sheer remembering of a dog, searching for a dog, dreaming of a dog … and we understand that this allusive and non-declarative storytelling without a story is one of the highest virtue of cinema.

Luka Papić | SRB 2022 | 63’ | Jury Prize for the Best Medium Length Film
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The use of found footage seems to having established itself as a sort of standard form of the memory in the cinema of the 21th century. The author’s intentions and interventions become transparent mainly through the editing process, thereby relegating the image to the status of a piece of evidence. From this point of view, Daniela de Felice’s Ardenza is a passionate liberation of the creative power of the image as a constructive layer that explores memory. Curtain-filtered images and watercolours make of this film a wonderful journey of the image – and of the imagination of which memory is done – into a personal past where the voice over assumes the role of factual thread. This thread is factual but not panoramic: the storytelling lays brilliantly on the expressive force of micro-events, which are able to speak of both a generation and an epoch.

Daniela de Felice | FR 2022 | 67’
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Being or becoming a mother has certainly been an inspiration for Eva Giolo, but instead of a thematic treatment of the topic, the Italian artist makes the centre of the film glide on one of the possible expressions of the topic: curves and round forms. These are the true focus of The Demands of Ordinary Devotion, through an almost surrealist play of image associations, whose inventiveness sounds as fresh air in the often pedantic world of documentary films. These forms take possession of the world, and work as a sort of vehicle of contagion. Let’s assume, just for a moment, that this is not subjective cinema but a scrupulous depiction of reality – this is the amused invitation of this delicious film.

Eva Giolo | IT 2022 | 12’
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Le retour aux racines et le questionnement sur l’identité multiculturelle sont des thèmes récurrents qui ne surprennent presque plus l’habitué des films documentaires. Mais Julie Sando réussit à nous faire participer à sa réappropriation du Japon avec une justesse rare, par le choix minimaliste de la confrontation touchante avec sa grand-mère et son micro-cosmos, indéfini et riche à la fois. L’indéfinissable du questionnement trouve ainsi une incarnation physique dans une personne et une relation, desquelles nous sentons que nous pouvons découvrir encore et toujours des aspects inattendus.

Julie Sando | CH 2022 | 44’ | Jury Prize of the National Competition and Zonta Award
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Jules Guarneri tourne sa caméra vers son père pour une confrontation cinématographique directe, dialectique, où la direction est continuellement renvoyée de l’un à l’autre. L’humour renforce le père comme personnage, face auquel il n’est pas facile de trouver sa place, entre distance et affection. L’admirable travail de montage constitue le véhicule pour atteindre, avec le film, une émancipation inattendue.

Jules Guarneri | CH 2022 | 73’ | Special Jury Award of the National Competition
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À travers le témoignage exceptionnel d’un acteur du système de corruption et de violence qui déchire la Colombie, Felipe Monroy construit un récit qui est un « j’accuse » sans concession, un cri pour la dignité des victimes, dans une tentative de faire du film un instrument de changement.

Felipe Monroy | CH-COL 2022 | 98’ 
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Film immersif et sensoriel sur une autrice dont on aimerait découvrir plus de son œuvre et de son art, qui délivre un témoignage sensible de Paris pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale – avec un inévitable écho à l’actualité…

Rachel Noël | CH 2022 | 70’
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Le film de Patrick Muroni est un important témoignage d’idées, ou plutôt d’attitudes qui sont dans l’air du temps. J’aimerais bien parler de combat contre le patriarcat et de révolution queer, qui sont effectivement incarnés par les ardente.x.s dont il fait le portrait. Mais il s’agit malheureusement de thèmes laissés sur le bas-côté, noircis ou confondus avec le thème de la pornographie, qui est dramatiquement absent comme sujet du film. Car il n’est pas possible d’approcher la question délicate de la pornographie sans thématiser les aspects de l’argent, du métier, et surtout du voyeurisme – tous absents, ici, en faveur de l’exhibition du making-of de quelques vidéos amateurs où il est question de vivre le plaisir plus que de le montrer. C’est à nous d’être voyeurs, à Muroni et à son film de professionnaliser le collectif d’ardente.x.s, à la production et distribution d’Ardente.x.s de faire circuler un peu d’argent. Sans distance par rapport à ses protagonistes, le film de Muroni ne documente donc pas mais performe, de façon indirecte et retenue, une sorte de pornographie ou, mieux, une intention de pornographie.

Patrick Muroni | CH 2022 | 96’
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Less is more. Or, more precisely, a reduced grammar of things leaves room for our imagination, reflections, feelings: our own personal cinema. A bird, electric wires, a child, and eventual daily micro-happenings, observed from a balcony. Eugenio Polgovsky’s camera is almost immobile, and occupies a territory that lets the world come to us. Mara Polgovsky resumes his brother’s images in a poetic and refined network of revelations.

Eugenio Polgovsky, Mara Polgovsky | MEX-CH 2022 | 64’
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Brillant film à dispositif, où l’intelligence du setting se marie à un esprit provocateur que je trouve bienvenu à l’époque de la paranoïa sociétale et du politically correct. Non sans une rudesse ironique toute viennoise, Ruth Beckermann propose à son casting d’hommes – et à nous-mêmes – de faire l’expérience de la lecture d’un texte dont la force est l’ambiguïté d’un assujettissement volontaire. Le pouvoir de libération de toute relation de pouvoir, qui serait propre au livre « de » mademoiselle Mutzenbacher, contraste radicalement avec un dispositif filmique qui, par contre, se plait à célébrer la relation de pouvoir. Car celle-ci se trouve, sans ambiguïté ni remise en question, exclusivement dans les mains de la réalisatrice, véritable domina face à ses hommes soumis. Voilà une contradiction qui mériterait d’être discutée davantage que les récits de mademoiselle Mutzenbacher, dont le scandale – à quelques exceptions près – ne révèle que le moralisme des lecteurs et lectrices.

Ruth Beckermann | AT 2022 | 100’
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Autoportrait d’une cinéaste en quête d’hommages : Mitra Farahani filme surtout sa volonté de tisser un dialogue impossible entre Ebrahim Golestan et Jean-Luc Godard ; elle à l’ombre de Golestan, Golestan à l’ombre de Godard, selon une verticalité religieuse, celle de l’autorité intellectuelle. Les moments d’humour et quelques provocations de Godard font vibrer un film autrement bloqué dans le pathos humaniste et paternaliste du vieillard iranien. Un pathos qui, parfois, sait même rendre « pathétique » le défaitisme du vieillard de Rolle.

Mitra Farahani | FR-CH-LEB 2022 | 96’
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What is this collage of glamour-kitsch aesthetic in order to glorify the hooliganism of a bunch of bored and boring teenagers if not an indigestible saga of filmic opportunism? Mediocrity of men should deserve indifference, whereas filmic vulgarity (or uncritical show-off, in case it would declare itself as documentary,) always demands a complaining mention. That’s that.

Yuri Ancarani | IT 2021 | 100’
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