Émilie Bujès: Last News

Documentaries about the impact of war claimed two of the top prizes as the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam handed out awards Thursday night.

Lise Pedersen Visions du Réel, one of Europe’s foremost documentary festivals, returns for a 56th edition with its most diverse lineup to date, featuring some 154 films from a record 57 countries. Spanning the globe, from Mongolia to Australia, Cameroon to Lebanon, the selection underscores the festival’s rising stature as a truly international platform for documentary cinema and a key meeting point for industry professionals.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, who was Oscar-nominated for “I Am Not Your Negro,” will be the Guest of Honor at the 56th edition of documentary festival Visions du Réel, which runs April 4-13. During the festival, Peck will deliver a masterclass and present a retrospective of his work, as well as a screening of his latest feature film, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.” Emilie Bujès, the festival’s artistic director, said Peck’s work was of “exceptional political impact and cinematographic force.” She added, his films are “inextricably linked to an alternative and engaged way of thinking about the world and its history, embodied by key figures which he has invariably made part of inspiring, precisely articulated and highly literary forms.” In a statement, the festival noted that his films “examine denials from official Western history, shining a light on aspects ignored by this account, often sketching a portrait of politicians or artists who have openly deconstructed it,” such as Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba in 1990’s “Lumumba, La Mort du prophète” and “Lumumba” in 2000, writer James Baldwin in “I Am Not Your Negro” in 2016, and, most recently, Ernest Cole with last year’s “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.” Peck’s work is “a reinvention of activist cinema, which he transforms using a cinematographic, poetic and highly subjective language, freely intermingling genres and formats,” the festival said.

Lise Pedersen Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel has unveiled the program for its 55th edition, which includes 10 first films out of 15 in the main international competition, cementing its reputation as a springboard for emerging talent. The official selection includes 165 films from 50 countries, with gender parity for the second-year running, and no fewer than 88 world premieres, making VdR the place to be in April on the international non-fiction film calendar.

Lise Pedersen Cannes Docs, the Cannes Film Market event dedicated to documentary film, brought together an expert industry panel to discuss the place of creative documentary in the fast-changing audiovisual market, where words like “content” and “format” are increasingly replacing “film” and “language.” Joining DAE co-founder Brigid O’Shea on stage for the May 21 talk were Emilie Bujès, artistic director of Swiss international doc film fest Visions du Réel (VdR); Edo Choi, associate curator of film at the NYC Museum of the Moving Image; and Ryan Krivoshey, president and founder of distribution company Grasshopper Film.

Lise Pedersen As Switzerland’s international documentary film festival Visions du Réel is about to wrap up, its artistic director Emilie Bujès, who’s been running the show since 2017 and was part of the selection committee for several years before that, told Variety that packed theaters throughout the 10-day event are proof that the public is back. She was very pleased to note that many of the 163 screenings were packed – “even the retrospectives!” – and she was delighted to have two women filmmakers among her guests. “They were fantastic. Symbolically, to have two strong women who were so generous with the audience – it was paradise,” she said of Alice Rohrwacher, who will be in Cannes’ main competition with “La Chimera”, and acclaimed Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, whose upcoming project, “Chocobar,” will be her first foray into feature-length non-fiction.

Trinidad Barleycorn “While the Green Grass Grows” by Peter Mettler won the Grand Prix of the International Feature Film Competition at the 54th edition of Visions du Réel, in Nyon, Switzerland, on Friday. The Swiss-Canadian director was competing with an unusual project: made in the form of a diary filmed from 2019 to 2021, “While the Green Grass Grows” is in fact a series of seven episodes with a total duration of about 11 hours. It was the finished parts one and six of the series, totalling 166 minutes, that were unveiled in world premiere at Visions du Réel and running for the Grand Prix. The whole project was also presented in the Work-in-Progress section in order to find other financing and distribution platforms to finalize the remaining parts, which have already been widely edited. This is the second time that Mettler has won the Grand Prix at Visions du Réel, after his victory in 2002 with “Gambling, Gods and LSD.”

Lise Pedersen Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel (VdR) has unveiled the lineup of its 54th edition, which features a broad panorama of both established names and newcomers from around the world. The festival kicks off on April 21 with the world premiere of “Nightwatchers” by Juliette de Marcillac and runs through April 30. The event will screen a total of 163 films from 46 countries, with a 50-50 parity between female and male directors. No fewer than 12 out of 14 films in the main International Competition and 13 out of 15 in the Burning Lights section, the festival sidebar dedicated to new documentary expression, are world premieres, bearing testimony to the fest’s reputation for setting the trend on the global doc scene.

Lise Pedersen Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel (VdR), which revealed its industry program last week, has unveiled its full lineup as it prepares to welcome participants both in person and online. A total of 160 films will be screened throughout the fest, which runs from April 7 through to April 17 in half a dozen venues in and around the city of Nyon.While the event is back in its physical form, organizers have learned from the past two editions and decided to keep a strong online presence.

Marco Bellocchio Honorary Prize