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, 2020Visions 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