Lise Pedersen “The Landscape and the Fury” by Switzerland’s Nicole Vögele took the Grand Jury Prize in the International Feature Film Competition at Swiss doc festival Visions du Réel on Friday.
Shot on the Bosnian-Croatian border, which is also the European Union border, the film unveils the struggle of refugees being chased away by police and navigating a terrain still contaminated with mines from the Bosnian War.
It marks a return to VdR for Vögele, who premiered her first short film “Mrs Loosli” at the fest in 2013. Her 2018 debut feature, “Closing,” won the Special Jury Prize for Filmmakers of the Present at Locarno.
Her win marks a hat-trick for Swiss documentaries after Peter Mettler picked up the top prize last year with “Where the Green Grass Grows” and Tizian Büchi won in 2022 with “L’Îlot.” The jury, composed of Italian journalist and former Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian, producer Dora Bouchoucha and filmmaker Carmen Jaquier, said they were “impressed by the approach of a film which renders, little by little, the complexity of reality and allows the viewer to question their place in the world.” The Special Jury Award was handed to Nelson Makengo’s “Rising Up at Night,” which portrays a community in Kinshasa navigating the challenges of a flooded city under the cover of darkness.
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