Visions du Réel Burning Lights: Cinema, Now More Than Ever

Exploring cinematic memories

By Chris Cassingham

It’s never easy to wade through any festival lineup, especially one as rich and provocative as the Official Selection of this year’s Visions du Réel. 

With limited time as a virtual attendee this year, I chose to focus on the medium and feature-length Burning Lights competition, dedicated to, “new, free, adventurous and contemporary perspectives in cinema.” 

These three films in particular couldn’t be more different in content;  one recalls a man’s adolescence in late-1970s Russia, another imagines the fate of one of Ferdinand Marcos’ generals, and the final one plays out a fictional deposition involving Tom Hanks. 

Yet threading these disparate stories together is a distinct consciousness of cinematic form and construction, and an understanding of those elements’ ability to shape our memory of the world and ourselves. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!