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Visions du Réel 2025: Choose Your Illusion
David Ekwe-Ebobisse in Soldiers of Light In 2002, a George W. Bush aide coined the phrase “reality-based community”—a label meant pejoratively, anticipating the present belligerent moment. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” that (still!) anonymous official ranted. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This psychotic assertion is paraphrased—nearly word-for-word, surely inadvertently—by the subjects of Julian Vogel and Johannes Büttner’s immaculately depressing Soldiers of Light, the first noteworthy film I saw at this year’s edition of Visions du Réel. Friends since their teenage years, for their first joint effort the filmmakers leveraged Büttner’s childhood acquaintance with David Ekwe-Ebobisse, aka “Mr. Raw,” a “raw food influencer”; the resulting portrait is even more dire than I could have predicted based on that combination of words.
“Justice, peace, raw vegan food”: when describing themselves with those bullet points, Mr. Raw and his minions don’t seem so bad. But there is, of course, much more to their program; they’re part of the Kingdom of Germany (KRD), which claims the German government is illegitimate and thus has set up their own republic (tax-exempt, naturally). Like schizophrenics who construct internally airtight, externally ridiculous theories bracketing the entire world, these types of delusional conspiracists create totalizing matrices to organize bottomless nonsense; over the course of the film, we hear that only 13% of the planet is populated by real people (the rest are artificial beings), 20% of people are psychic (Venn diagram on the overlap between those two demos is unclear), satanic child sacrifice for the purpose of adenochrome harvesting is real, etc. Per the national context, there’s also wishy-washy Holocaust denial in the mix, of the “I don’t know, but were our ancestors really that bad?” variety. Tightly structured by editors Sebastian Winkels and Yasaman Ahmadi, one of Soldiers of Light’s strongest features is offering a steady, attenuated drip of such beliefs throughout: with only 20 minutes to go, we learn that Flat Earth truthers are in the ideological mix, and with ten remaining a homophobic crypto pitchman enters the picture. In this framework, language predictably starts to lose all pre-established meaning, as when a KRD adherent starts popping off that he’s not rightwing, he’s more in the political center—but it’s worth nothing that in German “right” derives from the word for “righteous,” while “left” comes from the word for “deceit,” so… Cf. Thomas Bernhard’s The Lime Works: “Words exist to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in doing so.”
Soldiers of Light’s narrative centers around the relationship between Mr. Raw and Timo, a dead-eyed depressive looking to stave off his paranoid schizophrenic voices through fasting and veganism. The film vividly illustrates how, in the absence of other readily available solutions, valid dissatisfaction with the state of things leads down a slippery conspiratorial slope. In a late-film confrontation with his parents, Timo insists that his fasting is to purge toxins. These, thanks to PFAS, are certainly already in all of us; Crimes of the Future, an ostensibly speculative portrait of survival via adaption to microplastics consumption, is actually a documentary set in the very imminent future. But Timo attributes the toxins’ presence to gluten, hence the need to visibly starve himself over the course of the film, a decision with consequences direr than I could have imagined.
A different denial of reality provides the macro-framework for David Bim’s To the West, in Zapata, in which the gap between ostensible present-day Cuban revolutionary practice and the abject physical reality occupied by its three protagonists is unavoidably wide. While introducing his first feature, the endearingly earnest filmmaker apologized to his beloved, in-attendance parents for making his introduction in English, a language they don’t speak; the movie, he said, is a portrait of the cardinal importance of family love. The first part of this 74-minute two-chapter portrait begins with an immaculate shot following father Landi through swamps, a crocodile coiled around his neck. On this very special episode of Crocodile Hunter: La libertad, the editor-DP-director and his subject are in physically immersive sync and, despite the financially necessitated limitation of shooting with a gimbal, Bim comes very near to joining the Steadicam-tracking-shot hall of fame alongside Gerry and the collected work of Alan Clarke. At first the forest is densely crowded with trees, and their shadows let the reptile’s skin stay detailed and shaded in unusually well-rendered black-and-white; as director and subject keep moving, the trees space out, sunlight starts flooding in and washing out the animal’s hide. This goes on for a hypnotic/festival-film length of time while the very detailed sound mix raises and lowers the surrounding roar of insects et al., making the film a natural for an Atmos remix.
When the camera finally gets to rest at Landi’s camp, he hand-cranks a radio for company. The announcer says that it’s “year 63 of the Cuban Revolution,” exhorting listeners to fresh acts of anti-hegemonic resistance; meanwhile, Landi, resourceful because he’s maximally dispossessed, camps under the barest of shelter. Another showstopper shot follows on the next day, Bim trudging behind Landi as he wades into swamp water, pulls out a pole with a loop around it and proceeds to lasso, tie and transport away a crocodile in real time, the filmmaker maybe all of ten feet away in the water while capturing this fairly insane feat. The length of the shot is a promise that Bim won’t end it until the last spectacular thing has happened; as the boat pulls away, the seemingly-totally-restrained captive creature flicks its tail to the boat’s side with an unnerving thwack—and cut, immediately, for a rhythmically perfect finale. There’s nothing gratuitously Vice-macho here, just the immersively rendered necessity of the feats it takes to provide for family with zero resources. The second half provides an equally walk-and-work intro to Landi’s partner Mercedes and their son before unsentimentally reuniting husband and wife in another epic mobile movement. The last ten minutes don’t land but it’s nonetheless a very impressive debut, uber-formalist while in complete solidarity with its subjects; it’s not an either/or choice!
An even more cinematographer-forward film, Chronicle is photographer and DP Martin Kollar’s second feature as a director. Every shot is a setpiece, almost to the point of over-satiation—important, because there’s maybe six lines of dialogue in the whole movie, the first of which doesn’t arrive for 25 minutes. Beginning with impressively bleak winter landscapes that place a lot of faith in colorist Lucia Kovalova’s ability to separate out a dozen shades of white, Kollar’s line of structural argument is oblique but there’s plenty to look at, both when the camera is still or in its rare moments of movement. Shooting in his homeland of Slovakia in a process that Kollar said took eight years, Chronicle thus begins before the pandemic, establishing a bad mood as the default vibe; when hazmat suits and swab tests appear, it seems like a tonal inevitability rather than a historical disruption. The most actively alarming shot is of a police raid, presented entirely without context as five vans with ladders drive up to windows and cops run through them to kick unknown asses, a drone flying overhead for support. The overall effect is like a marginally peppier version of recent Niklaus Geyrhalter films like Homo Sapiens, a world tour which eliminated humanity altogether in favor of a suite of depopulated ruins; people still exist in Kollar’s world, but mostly in an atomized, solitary way.
The softer pleasures of the medium-length Roikin <3 counterbalanced these flavors of strongly executed bleakness. Credited as a collective work made in collaboration with its subjects, the film is assertively directed by Claudia Mollese, beginning with a highly stylized scene of three child social workers discussing their latest incoming charge. Each one is presented in a lowkey tableau portrait, frame center against a neutral white background, thus immediately establishing a fair amount of visual and structural artifice, since it’s unlikely three 16mm cameras were simultaneously rolling. Roikin’s narrative follows the titular orphan, a problem child who’s been kicked out of multiple schools in Marseilles, but this is clearly turmoil reconstructed in recollected calm. Immediately busted for vaping CBD in his new dorm, Roikin causes some low-key trouble before picking a fight with a boy at a snack stand; after he runs off in pique, his would-be adversary dramatically re-emerges in the darkness of night riding a white horse on the beach. Such eruptions of unexpected fantasy make Roikin the mildest version of a wild child saga, defanging angst for something surprisingly uplifting.
Similarly full of unlikely good cheer, Curtis Miller’s A Brief History of Chasing Storms takes “Tornado Alley” as a road trip prompt; the weather event is a centrifugal force that, in this case, also sucks in related kitsch and local eccentrics. A Midwestern native, the filmmaker is immune to the curse of European auteur visitors who seek out the stock lonely-yet-beautiful poetry of America’s open road; Miller renders the semi-distinctive ugliness of midwestern parking lots without trying to gussy them up. Allowed to ramble, flyover country residents offer unexpected insights; in Wakita, Oklahoma, a primary location for Twister, a man giving a walking tour of a dismally spaced-out suburban neighborhood notes that all the gaps between houses weren’t planned but the result of structures being uprooted by a storm in 1995 and nobody having the money to rebuild after. Elsewhere in town, a woman running the Twister museum fondly remembers Bill Paxton playing with local kids and the “good Hollywood catering” everyone benefitted from. The space is about an inglorious room and a half of analogue ephemera, but the tonally John Wilson-adjacent interview takes a melancholy turn when she notes that the community was chosen for filming in part because it looked truly storm-devastated, having been hit by a tornado which rendered the previous year’s harvest unsellable and leaving the town destitute. Today, she notes, Wakita’s population is under 400, since small-town farming is becoming unsustainable; economic destitution is a throughline, mapping climate change on top of larger dispossession. Primarily self-funded, Miller’s feature has the ever-so-slightly off-kilter rhythm of an experimental filmmaker trying to make something like his idea of a crowdpleaser, and the film’s given a further boost by skronking sax selections from Patrick Shiorishi’s 2021 jazz album Hidemi—the kind of aggressive and specific musical choice no one’s making right now and all the more tonally striking for it.
A decade-plus in the making, Clarisa Navas’s The Prince of Nanawa won the international feature film’s grand jury prize, a choice that makes sense not least because the 212-minute film is exemplarily representative of two dominant trends in current verite filmmaking. One is the normalization of longitudinal portraits similarly long in the making; the once-exceptional nature of a project like the 7 Up series or Boyhood is becoming a regular proposition. The other on-trend element is foregrounding the complexities of documentarian-subject relationships and the responsibility of the former to the latter, a concern this film makes as prominent as the subject’s life. The film begins with Navas and her crew on assignment for an Argentinian TV show, shooting interviews with locals in the Argentina-Paraguay border town of Clorinda. All the speakers they locate are sharp, but Navas is drawn to Ángel Stegmayer, a nine-year-old boy who pushes his way to the foreground and fortuitously turns out to be an unbelievable monologuist way beyond the “kids say the darnedest things” mode, immediately launching forth into an endearing but righteous diatribe about how Argentinian schoolteachers punish him and his Paraguayan-born peers for speaking their indigenous Guaraní language. Enchanted, the filmmakers follow Ángel with a long handheld from-behind shot as he takes them on a tour first of the local market, then over the bridge that leads from the Argentinian side of the border to his titular home in Paraguay. He’s film gold, but will he turn out to be a good subject in the long-term—or, more importantly, a good person?
Childishly likable as he is, Ángel’s internalized misogynies are repeatedly challenged by the filmmakers, who actively take on the role of rooting those out, even as they worry they’re being too militant with him. Whenever the production team isn’t there, they leave a camera and Ángel becomes his own documentarian pest to the annoyance of family and friends, adding an extra level of “can the filmmaker please go away” tension. But everyone generally gets along fabulously, with a lot of on-camera hugs between subject and crew members. Well-shot by Navas and Lucas Olivares and exceptionally well-edited by Florencia Gómez García, parceling out small pieces of information that explicate Ángel’s past while setting up the film’s future trajectory, The Prince of Nanawa ticks right along for its first 100 minutes; the intermission comes, as you might expect, when the pandemic drops. The second half of the film, a post-COVID journey into Ángel’s teenage years, is less successful, in part because the filmmakers love their protagonist a little too much. The length eventually starts to manifest as an inability to let go, while the team’s notion of what constitutes a satisfying ending (in accordance with the subject’s own desired path for his life) doesn’t necessarily match mine. I wish one more outsider had come in to take an editorial pass, but I’m not mad I watched it, nor that the jury highlighted it.
