When it comes to world-class documentary films, Visions Du Réel (12-21 April, Nyon, Switzerland), offering a fantastic slate of World Premieres, is up there with the very best. I had the joy of catching a limited selection of this year’s offering and was struck not only by the subjects on display — stretching from archival cine-memoirs to slow-burn character portraits to historical investigations — but also the aesthetic means by which the films were told; not merely content to put a subject in front of a camera but to find novel ways of framing them and reframing their story. Check out some of our coverage below!
Mother Vera. Breaking the Habit
International feature film competition entry Mother Vera (Marie-Cecile Embleton, Alys Tomlinson, 2023) started as Ex-Voto (2019), a series of large-format black and white photos taken by Tomlinson at pilgrimage sites across Ireland, Poland and France. One nun in particular, the eponymous Vera, formerly known as Olga, lingered long in her mind. The resultant film, almost six years in the making, follows her life as an Orthodox nun in a remote location in Belarus. Entering the faith several years ago as a response to her boyfriend Oleg’s imprisonment, as well as a way to battle her own drug addiction, the final result is a tender, visually striking and hard-wrought tale of personal salvation — both within and without the Church.
It’s shot in austere black-and-white, bringing to mind the nunnery tale of Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013), the films of Bela Tarr, and classic Soviet cinema: bare pine trees evoking Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) and endless shots of snow reminiscent of The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977). The stark black nun habit contrasted against the pure white of the surrounding wintry countryside sharpens the senses, highlighting Olga’s struggle against the forces of mental evil while striving for mental clarity.
Read the rest over at Journey into Cinema
Fragments of Ice Dances Under a Crumbling Empire
Some documentary filmmakers are born lucky. Maria Stoianova seems like one of them.
Her lovely, yet bracing, cine-memoir is almost exclusively composed of archive footage shot by her Ukrainian father Misha, an ice ballet dancer, between 1986 and 1994, capturing the intimacies, uncertainties and transformations of an emerging nation dancing under the shadow of a crumbling empire.
Filled with a wealth of material, from the political to the personal, from kitsch performances to tender moments, Fragments Of Ice (2024) expertly builds upon a vast video treasure trove to create a particularly Ukrainian rhapsody of ordinary life at the so-called end of history.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema
Okurimono Captures the Long Shadow of History
“When I was most beautiful/People around me were killed” — “When I Was Most Beautiful” by Norika Ibaragi, 1953
With undulating hills that meet the ocean, Instagram-perfect sunsets and rows upon rows of traditional houses, Nagasaki looks positively paradisiacal. Canadian filmmaker Laurence Lévesque takes his time to capture the waxing and waning of the light and the slow rhythms of everyday life in his debut feature Okurimono (2024), deliberately contrasting the beauty of the island city with its dark and tragic history.
For Nagasaki is not synonymous with beauty, but terror. On August 9th, 1945, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Americans dropped the Fat Man bomb on the city, killing at least 74,000 people. (They still haven’t apologised.)
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema