Visions du Réel Nyon 2024

As the essay film is becoming a genre in itself, one might forget just how much intellectual freedom there is in such cinema. Nina Forsman’s De gallo qui ovavit is a great reminder: a playful tour de force of putting ideas into motion, from a small, odd event that happened in Basel on the 4^th of August 1474 – a rooster was publicly executed for laying an egg – to an alert meditation on species, control and gender. It’s a witty story of “the laws of nature” as understood by culture: a history of law, religion and sexuality, humorously accompanied by a montage of found footage clips of chicks, chickens, roosters etc. collected from silent newsreels, audiovisual ephemera, vintage bizarreries and recent TV reportages. No matter how whimsical a film, De gallo qui ovavit has the singular quality of the double meaning. Gag after gag after gag, its critical exposure doesn’t lose itself in humour even for a second, instead making great use of it. As in the best of essay cinema, it’s an attempt at opening ideas and enclosing images – the violence of the representation of domestic birds as easy commodity, i.e. eternal victims, becomes inescapable once viewed through this film. (CB)

Nina Forsman | FIN 2024 | 15’ | International Medium Length & Short Film Competition
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There’s something peculiar about Nikola Ilić’s found footage memoir from times of war, specifically its sedated (im)personality, both in form and narrative, as the n^th recent film about the collapse of Yugoslavia. In late adolescence at that time, the director talks about the failed attempt of serving in the army as a convinced pacifist, and eventually about his own private – but not uncommon – subterfuge: pretending to be mentally ill. Using what seems to both personal and found footage shot on VHS in the last years of the 90s, as well as institutional surveillance footage, Exit through the Cuckoo’s Nest seems distant, unremarkable, a fragmentary reminiscence of no intense feeling, particular detail or emotional tale. To some, these might be its faults. However, I found myself excited about Ilić’s approach, at a time when I’m rather unimpressed by discourses about history as epiphany or trauma. Sometimes, history is an untouchable spectacle, and the narrator? Nothing but an unreliable witness. Ilić’s way of remembering is sober, a resigned sadness free of fury or victimization, somehow similar to that popular wisdom of elders and to a “natural” way of addressing history. Complementary, the images seem nothing save a natural landscape of VHS imagery, by now unmistakably associated with political turmoil and Y2K leisure. (CB)

Nikola Ilic | CH 2024 | 19’ | International Medium Length & Short Film Competition
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There are people counting birds. Lawrence Abu Hamdan records the Israeli airspace violations, and his one-year diary of the Beirut sky tells sinister stories in an impressive crescendo. Through patience and direct (analogue) eye witnessing, he obtains detailed knowledge and makes of this knowledge a weapon – a strategy that recalls the evidential approach of the Forensic Architecture group, which works with big data and digital animation instead. Knowledge from the sky leads to open questions and suspicions, for example those concerning Israel being responsible for the pollution of the largest source of water in Lebanon. More than a specific terrorist act, an entire terrorist strategy seems to emerge when we discover Hartmut Ising’s experiments on the health impact and psychological weakening of civilians around the US-military base of Rammstein in the 50’s, and how his results cost him exile – and prosecution of the study… in Israel! The spectre of subliminal torture and bio-warfare is then surpassed in decibels by the consequences of Lebanese corruption, because the shortage of electricity in Beirut caused the increased use of electricity generators. The touristic initiative of helicopter flights over the Lebanese capital add stupidity on top of (the suspicion of) perversity and corruption. The sound pollution is a thread of a biological agenda of warfare that spare neither music nor silence: they create important pauses in the apnoeic editing of the film, but without really providing a moment of relief. The infamous Albinoni Adagio was used in Ising’s experiments, and the sudden silence of the Beirut sky is nothing less than the symptom of a definitely less subtle war on the other side of Israel, in Gaza. (GDS)

Lawrence Abu Hamdan | LEB 2024 | 44’ | Burning Lights
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Les images d’Au revoir Siam sont factuelles et parlent de la Thaïlande contemporaine, un territoire qui s’étend, dans l’espace, aux pays de ses exilés politiques et, dans le temps, à une histoire révolutionnaire enfouie. Le film laisse émerger entre les lignes le passé et la mémoire en guise de suggestions presque subliminales, comme dans la suite rapide de photos d’époque, ou par fragments, comme les cartes géographiques en tant que pièces d’un puzzle non résolu. De ce point de vue, l’usage du double écran est pleinement assumé, marqueur d’une distance intercontinentale mise en scène et médiée par la technologie ; il est également l’occasion de quelques ouvertures du paysage. La distance de l’exile met en question et célèbre l’idée de maison, ici refuge, là foyer perdu à jamais, ou encore sanctuaire dans une cave. Le langage symbolique joue subtilement mais toujours en tant qu’allié d’un fil rouge éminemment émotif, véritable architecture du montage de Domenico Singha Pedroli. Les images de la rivière, de ses rituels et des plongées en sont un exemple, pour tenir ensemble une série hétérogène d’éléments plus à travers une atmosphère que par une véritable narration. Atmosphère qui seulement vers la fin de cet “au revoir” filmique des exilés s’avère aussi être une quête personnelle où le réalisateur s’inscrit lui-même dans le film en confessant avec discrétion l’adieu à son grand-père. Par la combinaison d’idées filmiques originales et la capacité de se tenir à un langage elliptique qui mise sur la subjectivité du spectateur, Au revoir Siam témoigne de l’émergence d’une jeune voie de cinéma. (GDS)

Domenico Singha Pedroli | CH-FR 2024 | 29’ | National Competition
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Tout hurle le présent dans les images et les mots d’Anita Conti. Filmés et écrits dans les années 1950, les mouvements bleus de la mer et l’humour des anecdotes des pêcheurs nous paraissent pourtant si proches. Peut-être parce qu’ils sont commentés par Anita Conti aujourd’hui, interviewée en voix off du film. Mais peut-être aussi parce que tout cela est tragiquement actuel. Elle raconte qu’elle avait déjà alerté sur l’état de l’océan à l’époque, mais que personne ne l’avait écoutée parce qu’elle l’avait dit de façon « raisonnable », et qu’on écoute rarement la parole « raisonnable ». Un film d’archive qui résonne hors du temps. (MF)

Louise Hémon | FR 2024 | 38’ | International Medium Length & Short Film Competition
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Les Rangaines is a sing-along celebration of common sense and shared pleasures: documenting an improbable place out of place, the café La Perle in Brussels, Pablo Guarise paints a tender, communal portrait of the regulars, people who have been coming back to the bar, or to each other, for many years. While doing so, taking great pleasure in their relaxed gestures, quick biographies, neon light shows and nostalgic ballads, the director not only creates an uneasy tension between the bliss on-screen and the hors-champ, suggesting the imminent void of gentrification and alienation, but also challenges the strange ritual of karaoke as a performance of hidden communication. What could you disclose about yourself through others’ words – words so well-known, so relatable, that they become public?  Nonetheless, there must be personal meaning in those words, a desire to communicate via singing-along. Eventually, Les Rangaines is a tender view upon communing, and the public space as shared intimacy. (CB)

Pablo Guarise | BE 2024 | 25’ | International Medium Length & Short Film Competition
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Gerard Ortín Castellví ’s ballet mécanique is a work of demystification, cold observation, pragmatism and… unlikely pleasures. A no-comment rhythmization of footage involving the contemporary food industry, its storage, production, delivery and advertising, Bliss Point has the science-fiction effect of being both alienating and entertaining, unknown and yet familiar. It is, of course, a lucid deconstruction of food imagery and its mirages – the “bliss point” meaning the right amount of an additive ingredient that gives food a particular taste – but it’s rather its ambiguity that makes it stand out. In theory, of course, everything is bad about the contemporary food industry, and the film is quite specific with its examples, from freelance food delivery to AI-managed warehouses. But Bliss Point is an uncomfortable watch precisely because it indulges in the simple pleasures of order: bright colors, repetition, symmetry etc., as if it cannot look away from the beauty of manmade comfort. It’s the very same regime of images that encloses (covers) all that’s unwatchable about the food industry. Castellví makes a graceful demonstration of how every corporate logo should be read as a superimposition of shot (public image) and counter-shot (confidential image). (CB)

Gerard Ortín Castellví | IT-UK-ES 2024 | 26’ | International Medium Length & Short Film Competition
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J’avoue, j’ai parfois détourné les yeux. Pas parce que je crains les intelligences artificielles et leurs images parfois déformantes, mais parce que j’ai une phobie liée à tout ce qui touche aux matières qui composent le corps humain. Ils se trouve que les images générées dans 512x512 sont criantes d’humanité de la manière la plus effrayante possible. Sans jamais sacraliser l’IA, Arthur Chopin explore plutôt ses limites et ses biais, qui sont peut-être plus humains que machiniques. L’IA n’est pas ici un monstre terrifiant, mais plutôt un outil qui révèle la monstruosité de l’humanité. Essai précis et cinglant, 512x512 est une excellente porte d’entrée sur les questions liées à cette nouvelle technologie. (MG)

Arthur Chopin | FR 2024 | 21’ | Opening Scenes
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They tell their story and their own stories. A man and a woman speak of how they met and what they share, but the intelligent montage puts their voices both over and in front of the other, giving two quite different perspectives on the same meeting and the same relationship. It is actually the question of how to conceive a relationship that is at stake: sharing an interest, a place, a vision, or being open to revealing oneself to the other, for an exchange that can make them change? The epistolary construction of the film and this play with the perspectives imparts a crucial depth to the setting of a distant astronomic observatory in Georgia and to the cosmic reflections that make this place resonate, a place which would otherwise be sunk in melancholy. (GDS)

Keto Kipiani | GEO 2024 | 26’ | International Medium Length & Short Film Competition
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La rencontre entre cette cinéaste mexicaine étudiante à l’EICTV et le couple qui tient un centre funéraire d’une petite ville de la campagne cubaine appelait des moyens modestes, tant il s’agit d’un film d’étude et d’un centre marqué par sa simplicité qui confine à la pauvreté. Point d’approche condescendante, bien entendu, mais minimaliste. En quelques courtes scènes, l’essentiel des gestes et des mots sont donnés face caméra par l’homme et la femme. Leur présence est touchante par le soin qu’ils mettent à expliciter leurs taches. Et le monsieur de jouer au mort dans un cercueil que le corbillard en panne ne saurait mener bien loin. Histoire d’une vie qui jouxte celle des morts aux accents d’un humour d’une exquise délicatesse. (JP)

María Salafranca | CUB 2024 | 11’ | Opening Scenes
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