Visions du Réel 2012
… starts tonight and runs until April 27. As usual this festival offers a big programme – Switzerland is still a rich country, untouched by the international crisis? – with a lot of competition sections (7 different juries!) and a Doc Outlook International Market with a Videotheque, Consultancy on projects, a Pitching du Réel two-day event for feature length documentaries, a Doc Think Tank and two versions of Rough Cut presentations: One where 10 minutes are screened of a rough cut version and one where 3 hours are reserved for the filmmakers to meet specially invited professionals. Likewise the festival programme includes 13 (!) different sections with the international sections for long, medium duration and short documentaries as the ones that bring to light new films.
It is obvious that also the festival in Nyon does not like the philosophy of ”less is more” and for this blogger and hunter for new films, it is a good sign that he has only seen one film, wonderful ”The Punk Syndrome” (photo) by JP Passi and Jukka Kärkkäinen, out of the 17 titles in the long competition category. Looking forward to seeing, on another occasion, the new film by Swiss Peter Entell, “A Home far Away” that has this description from the site of the festival: “Lois, an American actress, and her husband, Edgar Snow, the first journalist to have reported and filmed the Chinese revolution, are suspected of Communist sympathies and forced into exile. They end up in Switzerland, near Nyon, half way between the US and China. Long after, when Edgar has passed on, Lois tells all. A story of utopia and disillusionment takes shape before the camera.” Also exciting it will be to see what the couple Antoine Cattin and Pavel Kostomarov (”Mother”) comes up with in their film about Russian director Alexei Guerman.
”Vivan las antipodas!” by Kossakovsky closes the festival, and Kossakovsky himself is in a film by a Chilean colleague, Carlos Klein, ”Where the Condors Fly” that has this site description: ” This is a story of the encounter of two filmmakers: the prizewinning Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky is in the middle of shooting his newest film, ¡Vivan las Antipodas! and the Chilean Carlos Klein films the passionate Kossakovsky at work. In the conflict and slipstream of Kossakovsky’s efforts, Klein rediscovers his own path to filmmaking.”
