Visions du Réel
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Visions du Réel 2024: The American Way and Other Options
Having living abroad for 19 years, music critic Philip Sherburne recently described the culture shock of returning home and trying to navigate an American supermarket: “the self-checkout machine accuses me of stealing and runs back video of me while calling for an employee to come intervene. Every time you turn around, it seems like a corporation is trying to screw you out of yet more money via another hidden fee. It’s no wonder Americans seem pissed off all the time. It’s a fundamentally hostile environment.” For me, some of the fun of attending Visions du Réel, a Swiss festival focused […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 24, 2024 -
“With a Documentary, It’s More Difficult to Find Humor”: Martín Rejtman on Riders
A decade ago, I interviewed Argentinian filmmaker Martín Rejtman for an hour, walking through the general scope of his career before discussing his then-most-recent feature, Two Shots Fired, which may help flesh out the parts of this interview relating to his first feature, Rapado. Rejtman’s new film, Riders, is only his second documentary. As I wrote in my dispatch on Visions du Réel 2024, where the film premiered, Riders kicks off in May 2020, with extended global lockdown fatigue ramping up; after an opening rally of delivery drivers protesting their horrible conditions (“It is inadmissable to normalize the bodies of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 24, 2024 -
Visions du Réel 2023: Nights Gone By, Linda and Irina, This Woman, Chagrin Valley
Visions du Réel is so punctilious about its nonfiction festival identity that the program booklet explicitly labels the few titles not fitting that (honestly very broad) categorization as “Fiction,” a tag only deployed this year for sidebar retrospectives of Alice Rohrwacher and Lucrecia Martel. For myself, I wanted to attend less because of any particular predilection for nonfiction and more because VdR seems full of stronger iterations of a type of movie I tend to enjoy, roughly categorizable as “relatively well-financed art-leaning European (co)productions”—i.e., I was primarily interested for aesthetic reasons, with the filmmakers chosen for this year’s sidebars illustrative […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 3, 2023 -
Visions du Réel 2023: Follow the Water, Zimmerwald, Knit’s Island, Human, Not Human
I’d enjoyed watching films from Visions du Réel online over the last three years, but in-theater is always better and this year that became possible. “I’m very interested in the festival, not so much the idea of ‘visiting Switzerland,’” I kept insisting in the weeks leading to my first IRL attendance—historically I’m left cold by the splendors of nature, don’t ski and have no large or illicit banking transactions to perform (to my regret!)—but that statement needed revision after arriving. On my first morning in Nyon, I walked to Lake Geneva and realized it looked uncannily familiar from Goodbye to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 25, 2023 -
Visions du Réel 2022: Nuclear Power Plants and Lacanian Robots
With no conscious motivation, I was repeatedly drawn to films about Russia and the USSR’s former satellite states while sifting through this year’s Visions du Réel. The most formidable, Emilija Škarnulytė’s Burial, visually maximalizes the inherently spectacular structures of nuclear power plants. A sparse clutch of title cards contextualize the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP)—built as an equally large sister to Chernobyl, its decommissioning and dismantling now a requirement for Lithuania’s entrance into the EU. The cavernous interiors slowly being broken down include, most captivatingly, a control room wall scanned in a three-minute, smoothly sustained right-to-left dolly, its nodes, buttons, meters and […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 11, 2022 -
“Those Years of Ecological Collapse and Pandemics”: Visions du Réel 2021
Last April, the opportunity to scope out Visions du Réel—a festival I’d never had the budget to attend in-person—came as a novel, welcome distraction. A year later, NYC’s weather is increasingly tolerable and the CDC says I’m ready to roam, but I enjoyed having the hybrid festival option once again on my way out the door; two years of browsing VdR have definitely expanded my understanding of global nonfiction norms, and I’d cheerfully make time at home for the rest in a re-opened world. Amid the films in this year’s lineup, one title, Kind Regards From the Anthropocene, pops out as […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 10, 2021 -
Visions du Réel 2020 (2): The Pageant, The Plastic House
The public-facing side of Visions du Réel 2020 has ended and, as far as I can tell, under the circumstances it’s a success. Variety reports that 95 out of 97 features went online; one of the abstainers simply couldn’t get their post done in time after the lockdown hit. In the regular international feature competition, Eytan Ipeker’s The Pageant is the rare film as infuriatingly outrageous as promised by its surprisingly unambiguous festival description (credited to selection committee member Emmanuel Chicon): Beauty contests, with their proven sexist aspect, can irritate. But that which has been taking place since 2012 in Haifa can arouse horror. Sponsored […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 8, 2020 -
Visions du Réel 2020 (1): Intimate Distances, On a Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here, An Ordinary Country
Visions du Réel’s pivot to online-only festival has given me an unexpected new pool of films to sift through. Nearly everything that was supposed to be on the ground at a fest I’d normally never have the resources to attend is accessible online, and the streaming technology is holding up excellently. (AirDropping from laptop to TV, if you have that option, eliminates the watermark, so it’s about as good as online streaming gets.) On the public-facing side (I have no idea how that’s going), the festival went “live” on Saturday the 25th and wraps up on May 2nd. For those […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2020 -
“A Friendly Person Who is Easier to Handle Than a Dog”: Werner Herzog’s Masterclass at Visions du Réel
A figure of such stature as Mikhail Gorbachev is an awkward fit for a documentary by Werner Herzog, a director whose non-fiction work has chiefly focused on extraordinary personalities and experiences excluded from history books. As such, it’s not overall surprising that his latest, Meeting Gorbachev (co-directed with his frequent producer André Singer), should be hamstrung by its subject, a man who withstood unimaginable political pressure and media scrutiny as he navigated, if not orchestrated, one of the most momentous chapters of the 20th century. As Herzog explained in a masterclass held during the 50th Visions du Réel documentary film […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Apr 12, 2019 -
“We Process Our Memories In a Dreamstate, Building Meaning Between the Absences”: Samara Grace Chadwick on her Hot Docs Doc, 1999
1999 is one of the most haunting documentaries I’ve ever seen, which perfectly suits its subject matter. Director Samara Grace Chadwick returns to the small Acadian town in New Brunswick, Canada that she left as a teenager after a wave of suicides shook her high school over a handful of years, though the actual events always remain somewhat mysterious and opaque. A portrait of a group of people who, just when they were beginning to live, came intimately face-to-face with the finality of death, 1999 is not an investigation but an immersion into the emotional flux of a community struggling […]
by Astra Taylor on Apr 24, 2018
