Visions du Réel, Nyon, continues to grow in stature and size into one of the most significant documentary festivals in the world; its recently concluded 57th edition featured a whopping 164 films from 75 countries. With a strong industry segment, co-production market and curation of special programmes, it is veritably an institution for contemporary documentary practice.
Which means it also flirts with the risk of institutionalization. I haven’t watched enough titles from the festival’s main section — International Feature Film Competition — to make a qualified judgement. But at a cursory glance, the section seems populated by commercially viable titles that embody a dominant tendency in documentary cinema today: human-interest stories featuring common people playing themselves, enacting fictionalized exchanges against the abstract backdrop of hot-button crises such as climate change, neoliberal plunder or geopolitical upheavals.
Like with all big festivals, the juicy, challenging and most rewarding films seem to be found in the sidebars, such as the experimentally oriented Burning Lights Competition. Here are a few of the titles from across the festival’s sidebars that I found most interesting.
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In the winter of 1973, a team of astronauts embarked on an 84-day-long stay aboard Skylab, NASA’s first space station. Not only was this the longest manned spaceflight thus far, the crew was also made of first-time astronauts. Assigned an unprecedented volume of tasks and experiments, they fell behind their schedule. Mission control, with whom they had brief contact over every orbit, urged them to catch up without paying heed to their deteriorating mental and physical conditions. Overworked and cooped up in a poorly designed environment unfit for long-term dwelling, the crew went quiet just before Christmas.
Accounts of what happened during this communications blackout differ significantly. The Case Against Space pursues the theory that the crew went on an organized strike, with the unstated demand that the working hours that apply on earth be applicable in space too. An extremely reduced kammerspiel, Graeme Arnfield’s film largely consists of performers talking to a frontal camera that simulates the radio equipment. These actors re-enact the crew’s experience in the days preceding the strike, their monologues based on transcripts of real communications with mission control, but complemented by creative speculation about what must have likely happened onboard. They describe their absurdly overstuffed to-do lists, their frustrations with faulty equipment and their dwindling faith in the top brass back home.
As the recent euphoria around Artemis II reminds us, space missions have historically been viewed in supra-political terms, as collective human accomplishments. At best, they have been proxies for national and ideological conflicts. The Case Against Space reframes the matter in starkly materialist terms. In Arnfield’s film, the work of astronauts isn’t the expression of human enterprise or techno-nationalist superiority, but concrete labour carried out for demanding bosses on earth. There’s no velocity high enough to escape the class struggle.
In 2019, Argentinian filmmaker Ignacio Ceroi bought a used camcorder on eBay and found that it was full of fascinating home and travel movies. Wishing to make a film from this material, Ceroi reached out to the camera’s old owner, an elderly man with a potbelly and an insistent moustache who figures regularly in the videos. This man, named Charles, gave the filmmaker the go-ahead and even shared personal stories that will help explain the footage. Ceroi went to work with this information and produced a film titled What Will Summer Bring (2021), a documentary about a man who went to Cameroon on an accidental adventure, fell in love with a woman there and ended up in the jungles in search of her renegade son. Since the film is entirely narrated by Ceroi on behalf of Charles, it is hard to know how much of all this is fabricated.
As it turns out, all of it was. While the footage and the camcorder were real, Ceroi never really found its owner. The entire story was made up, and there was no person named Charles. Those appalled by this impish piece of media-hacking wouldn’t probably care for Ceroi’s follow-up film titled Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room, I Like It as It Is. Here, Ceroi admits to being anxious all these years about the real owner getting a whiff of his heist. To find closure, he sets out in search of the owner — this time for real — with the help of a professor from Paris and contextual clues from the footage.
It would be revealing too much to say what happens next. But I found the film strangely touching. Whether intended in apology, curiosity or respect, Ceroi’s journey in search of the camera’s owner is a pilgrimage, a reparative attempt to wrest truth from fiction and return it to reality. His first film was the fruit of pure coincidence — the resale of an old camera — but the sequel suggests that even anonymous, arbitrary images can be the catalyst for meaningful relationships. While the former was based on a fake correspondence, the second one strives to create a real one. Through this striving, Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room honours the memory of “Charles”, whose afterlife in recorded images comes to hold personal significance for those who have encountered them.
At first sight, Uberto Rapisardi’s Vacío Luminoso is a straightforward making-of documentary about Oliver Laxe’s arthouse hit Sirāt (2025). It details the filmmaker’s intentions, the casting and shooting process, the contribution of actors and technicians, and the craft behind the film’s most memorable — and shocking — scenes. But Rapisardi’s account does something more: it shows how the film was almost not made. Rapisardi intercuts footage from the sets of Sirāt with an interview with Laxe recorded at a moment of crisis during the last days of the shoot. Laxe is evidently dejected by something he doesn’t fully name and has retreated from the sets in frustration. Shot in extreme closeup, Laxe outlines the influence of Sufi thought and practice on his work. He also expresses horror at the flagrant incongruity between the spiritual origin of Sirāt — which is, among other things, a religious parable about ego loss — and the megalomaniacal behaviour that mounting such an international, quasi-super-production instils in him. Rapisardi also interviews actors who express their misgivings about the mismatch between the stated intentions and the methods of the film. In prying open the contradictions at the heart of Sirāt, Vacío Luminoso points to the resistances that lie at the heart of all creative endeavour.
What Lauren Dällenbach’s debut feature Nicole Nicole pries open are the contradictions of Western family relations. Winner of the National Competition section, Dällenbach’s endearing domestic documentary centres on the filmmaker’s grandmother, Alberte, and her maternal aunt, Nicole, who live together in mutual dependence – the former afraid of being alone, the latter neurodivergent and seemingly incapable of striking out on her own. This dependency, although functional, is a ticking bomb since Nicole cannot live forever with her ageing mother. What’s more, Nicole, we learn, has a secret lover, whom she sneaks out to meet without ever being able to bring him home.
To address this, Nicole’s wider family, primarily her elder sister (the filmmaker’s mother), hatches a plan to help her move out. Working with public institutions, they find a way for Nicole to find a job, a new apartment and, most importantly, the courage to tell Alberte that she will be leaving. Part of the challenge for them is in defining Nicole’s unique mental condition: her intellectual metrics are too low for a completely independent life, but too high to be considered autistic so that the state’s disability support system can come into effect.
As a maker of exterior images, however, the filmmaker has no need to label Nicole. With great affection and care, she spends time with her aunt, probing with hopeful thrill into her secret romance and even conspiring to turn her life into one of those softcore photo-comics that she loves reading. At one point, when Nicole breaks down at the thought of her mother’s eventual death, Dällenbach puts her camera down to go embrace her aunt — an acknowledgement of the filmmaker as a human that I have rarely seen in documentaries.
“Dear comrades, do not allow them to make me anything other than what I am, and what I wish to be: a revolutionary fighter.” These are some of the last words of a letter that Michèle Firk left to her friends-in-arms, titled “to be opened in case of”. What this unmentioned case might be was perhaps clear to Firk’s comrades engaged in militant struggles against imperialism in various corners of Latin America. Born in Paris in 1937, Firk began as a film critic at the magazine Positif (a role later memorialized in Luc Moullet’s Les Sièges de l’Alcazar), but her real calling was politics. At 24, as part of the Jeanson network, Firk was a voice for Algerian independence, and her interest would soon expand to international Third World movements.
Firk was acutely aware of the hypocrisies of armchair intellectualism and, unlike many of her peers in France, sought to refashion her life in line with her beliefs. “What is shameful is speaking casually of Vietnam without changing one’s life, being objectively informed from afar without getting involved,” she wrote in her final letter. In the early sixties, she moved to Cuba, where in addition to working the fields and meeting Che Guevara, she was an interpreter at the Tricontinental Conference of 1966. After years of pseudonymously moving across countries in service of the cause, she found herself involved in armed struggle in Guatemala. Implicated in the kidnapping of an US ambassador, Firk allegedly shot herself in her hotel room when the police came knocking.
Swiss helmer Laura Cazador’s rousing cine-portrait of Firk, Tricontinental, Letter to Open in Case Of, takes the words of the letter to heart, presenting the subject on her own terms, without distance, condescension or historical relativization. It helps that Cazador is committed to the same causes as Firk and has a shared affinity for Havana where she works at the EICTV film school. Cazador structures her film wittily, borrowing chapter titles and clips from anti-imperialist Third Cinema works. This is supported by a dense and propulsive voiceover composed of a mix of Firk’s own words and the filmmaker’s second-person account of Firk, creating a sense of complicity between the two across time. Cazador’s Firk is not a girl lost to history, but a model to be emulated, a guiding light shining on the horizon.
Cuba, specifically the EICTV, also features prominently in another title I was very taken by: Peter Mettler’s While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts (which premiered in Toronto in 2025). Mettler’s seven-part, seven-hour-long diary film is an utterly unique object — part home movie, part travelogue, part visual experiment, part philosophical essay. But this colossal documentary is foremost a record of Mettler’s life over three years, which includes the passing of his aged parents as well as a major health scare for himself. Alternating between time spent with parents and encounters with people during professional trips, the filmmaker weaves a sprawling meditation on human striving, material and spiritual. Weighty considerations on what lies beyond immediate human experience rub shoulders with life as it is lived one day at a time.
Mettler incorporates vast amounts of natural vistas, especially water bodies, while the soundtrack carries his monologues and conversations. This oblique arrangement prompts us into reveries and reflections of our own, but integral to the subject at hand. Internal rhymes and echoes abound — remarks, themes and images from one section are reprised in others in subtle and surprising ways. At once ambitious and unassuming, Mettler’s film doesn’t shy away from overt philosophizing, but also lets the beauty, banality, frailty and absurdity of life trickle through in its quieter passages. I can’t recall a recent film in which every moment, every element becomes such a thorough expression of the filmmaker’s state of mind and life situation. Possibly one of the most vital documentaries of the decade.
I’ve had no greater screen delight this year than watching two white dudes chat for two hours. Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper hole up in a dark room with half a dozen technicians to talk filmmaking, politics, religion, love, magic, news, television and literature while dutiful assistants scurry about readying one refill of liquor for them after another. Welles plays the Grand Inquisitor, pressing his timid interlocutor to state his artistic and political beliefs, conjuring theories to counter him and never allowing him a resting ground. We never see him, save for rare glimpses of his bellowing pin-striped trousers moving at the edge of the frame. As Hopper’s cinematic forefather, Welles looms large, appearing to be incarnating some kind of metaphysical force, orchestrating a Kafkaesque trial for the young man. What results is a stark power imbalance between the seen and the unseen, the subject and the author, the one who is recorded and the one who wields the camera. But the primary pleasure of the film lies in seeing two artists in a terribly absorbing conversation, grappling with the cinematic-aesthetic problems of their time. Going public after fifty years, Hopper/Welles is both a standalone film and an anniversary celebration. It hasn’t dated one bit.
Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s funny, sharp and dizzyingly smart video work begins as a commentary on Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives (2017), a desktop film about the crowd-sourced investigation on Reddit following the Boston bombing of 2013. As the director breaks down Kennedy’s film, analysing its narrative construction and its tendency for geometric abstraction, she voluntarily gets caught in an ‘analytical frenzy’, not unlike the Redditors themselves. As Galibert-Laîné seamlessly chains one stream of thought after another, her film evolves into a meta-reflection on our relation to images and our compulsion to create meaning from visual material. If 
What remains of the modernist dream of reshaping human societies from the ground up based on scientific, rationalist principles? Goldstein and Zielke’s ambitious, erudite and formally complex city symphony seeks to find out. Its subject is Brasilia, the artificially created capital of Brazil that architects Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa forged out of the wilderness in the late fifties. The imposing geometric forms of the city, expressly conceived in cosmic terms and perfected like Kubrickian monoliths from outer space, appear to have all but snuffed out human presence. Machine sees this city as an otherworldly geography unfit for human life, but also allowing the possibilities of imagining utopias, catholic cultists, freemasons, biker gangs and Esperanto evangelists all finding a home within Brasilia’s orbit. Employing heterogenous narrative modes, Goldstein and Zielke develop a visually striking portrait of a city that has come to resemble a religious monument in itself, demanding awestruck worship and constant maintenance by people who can’t afford to live here. Their Brasilia is either a place that inspires dreams of reimagining life or an abyss where dreams come to die. Even as it looks back at a moment in modern intellectual history, Machine evokes questions about the future, inviting us to reflect on the eternal human desire to play demiurge.
Tamhane’s superb second film feels like home territory for him. Sharad, an apprentice Hindustani music singer, is not the greatest of talents, but imagines himself as part of a tradition, one that gives a structural meaning to his life. But, the promise of omnipresence and instant gratification of the modern world beckoning him, not only does he find himself unable to live up to the lofty ideals of his tradition, he’s also is gradually disabused of these ideals themselves. In a very direct manner, The Disciple zeroes in on a fundamental, civilizational sentiment that underpins artistic succession in the subcontinent: that of filial piety, as opposed to the parricidal narrative that informs the Western conception of self-realization. Even when his faith has been questioned, Sharad continues to serve his elderly teacher, caring for him till the final days, like icon worshippers who hold on to their idols even (and especially) when the meaning behind them is lost. Tamhane builds up gradually to this assault on Sharad’s worldview, with humour, suspense and a calculated formal reserve that redoubles the impact of the emotional violence. His film invites viewers to constantly process narrative information in order to access it, providing a rich dividend for the effort.
In Unusual Summer, Aljafari repurposes CCTV tapes that his father left behind after his death in 2015. The tapes are from the summer of 2006 and were used record the parking spot outside his home to see who’s been breaking the car window. Despite the dramatic promises of the CCTV aesthetic and the location of the house in the crime-ridden district of Ramla, what we get in this film are quotidian incidents, sightings of neighbours passing by, the picture of a town going about everyday business. Aljafari adds a sparse ambient soundtrack that imparts Tati-esque colour to the proceedings, with the passers-by on screen becoming veritable characters. This transformation of private surveillance footage into a session of window-watching and people-spotting produces a feeling of community and forges a relation of inheritance between the filmmaker and his father, the only two people to have seen these tapes. Supremely calming though it is, Unusual Summer is also seared by loss and mourning, the familiar faces, places, animals and trees that register like spectral presences on the lo-fi video having vanished in the intervening years following intrusions by the Israeli state. A minimalist gem that speaks to our now-amplified urge to reach out to others.
Dutta’s richly dialectical new film draws out themes from 
The Ross brothers’ new docuficion follows the last day of operation of The Roaring 20s, a downscale bar fictionally set in Las Vegas, at which a bevy of social castaways gather to mourn and celebrate. While all the actors play themselves, the filmmakers loosely fictionalize the scenario, giving direction to it with certain pertinent themes. Set against the backdrop of collapsing American businesses, Bloody Nose is a hymn for failure, a note of solidarity to what the American lexicon calls “losers”. The Roaring 20s is the opposite of everything one associates with the glitz and glamour of Sin City: it’s a floundering venture that is the negative image of the American Dream. For its regulars, however, the bar is something of an institution that provides them with a public (and, at times, private) space that has become scarce elsewhere and where they can be themselves. The film’s broader view of class is compounded by a specific generational perspective that refutes the idea that the young, the ‘millennials’, can’t make it because they don’t work hard enough. A film that hits the right moods without tipping over into condescension or miserabilism, Bloody Nose deserves all the plaudits it’s been getting.
Perel continues his exploration into Argentina’s military dictatorship by examining the role of large private corporations in enabling and carrying out state-sponsored pogroms against political dissidents of the junta. He photographs the company facilities as they are today while a brisk voiceover lists out how each firm helped military and security forces detain, torture and get rid of problematic workers in exchange for financial perks. The text, read out from an official 2015 report, is numbingly repetitious, and drives home the pervasiveness of these military-industrial operations. Perel’s decision to frame the sites through his car’s windshield creates a sense of illicit access, even though there is visibly little stopping him from going nearer the facilities. Some of the companies continue to operate under their own name, while some others have changed, with at least one site carrying a memorial sign for the injustice perpetrated there. Perel is, in effect, photographing the ur-filmic image of factory entrances, but all we see is a handful of vehicles leaving the gates. This eerie absence of human figures evokes the disappeared workers who, at some companies, were picked up at the entrance, a site, as 
Lynne Sachs’ frank, morally messy documentary turns around her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a ‘hippie businessman’ whose unconventional living and constant womanizing comes down heavily upon his nine children, some of whom have known the existence of the others only after decades. Sachs weaves through footage shot over half a century in half a dozen formats and layers it carefully into a simple, direct account with a voiceover addressed at the audience. She takes what could’ve been a narrow family melodrama into much stickier territory. Her film isn’t a portrait of her father, but a meditation on relationships with this man as the connecting element. Sachs goes beyond all gut responses to her father’s behaviour—disappointment, rage, disgust—towards a complex human reality that can elicit only inchoate sentiments, as suggested by the film’s incomplete title. She isn’t filming people or their stories, but the spaces between people, and how these spaces are always mediated by the actions of others. Father’s wayward life, itself rooted perhaps in a traumatic childhood, profoundly shapes the way his children look at each other. Sachs’ film is ostensibly a massive unburdening project for her; that she has been able to draw out its broader implications is a significant accomplishment.
As part of his work, Lashay T. Warren, a young family man from Los Angeles, is posted in Cal City, California, a town wrought in the fifties by a lone developer out of the Mojave Desert with the hope that it would become the next Los Angeles—a dream that didn’t come to fruition. Along with other men and women his age, Lashay is responsible for maintaining this ghost town by reclaiming its streets from nature and restoring some semblance of cartographic order. Victoria teases out various thematic layers from this singular scenario. On one level, it is an absurd tale about one of the many dead ends of capitalist enterprise, a kind of anti-Chinatown portrait of a Los Angeles that could’ve been. Lashay is like a worker repairing a remote outpost in space, marvelling at every sign of life in this almost otherworldly landscape. But he also resembles the American pioneers, whose diaries on their way to the West he emulates in the film’s voiceover. Ultimately, Victoria is a poignant, humanist document, in the vein of Killer of Sheep, about the dignity of a young Black man providing for his family, trying to graduate from high school, all the while fighting the gravity of Compton’s streets.
Chan’s diaristic digital work is divided into chapters named after family members and unfurls as a process of piecing together of familial history. Through various confrontational interviews with her mother and father, the filmmaker attempts to understand their failed marriage, her strained relation with her step-father and the violence that has structured them both. Chan’s decision to put her entire life-story on film is a brave gesture, but the film closes upon itself, satisfied to be a melodrama valorizing personal experience over broader frameworks. (Consider, in contrast, the rigorous domestic formalism of Liu Jiayin or the socio-political tapestry of Jia Zhangke’s early work.) Chan misses the forest for the lone tree. Winner of the Adolfas Mekas award of the fest.
Beep assembles anti-communist propaganda material from the 60s and the 70s commissioned by the South Korean state that was based on the mythologizing of a young boy, Lee Seung-bok, slain by North Korean soldiers. With the unseen, absent boy-hero at its focus, Kim’s film depicts the dialectical manner in which a nation defines itself in relationship to an imagined Other. Kim makes minimal aesthetic intervention into the source material – our relation to it automatically ironic by dint of our very distance from the period it was made in – restricting himself to adding periodic beep sounds to the footage, producing something like a cautionary transmission from another world.
Black Sun opens with a composition in deep space presenting a metonym for a country in the process of development: high-rise buildings in the background as a pair of actors in period costumes rehearse a scene in the foreground. In a series of Jia Zhangke-like vignettes of Saigon set in middle-class youth hangouts scored to pop songs and television sounds, interspersed with images of a metamorphosing city, we see the distance that separates art from reality and the middle-class from the changes around it. The film culminates in a complex, home-made long take following the protagonist across her house and out into the terrace, where she dances, presumably to the eponymous song.
The most challenging and elusive film of the competition I saw is also the most hypnotic. Cloud Shadow gives us a narrative of sorts in first person about a group of people who go into the woods and dissolve in its elements. The film is obliquely a story of the fascination with cinema, of the trans-individualist communal experience it promises, of the desire to dissolve the limits of one’s body into the images and sounds it offers. With an imagery consisting of sumptuous tints, and nuanced colour gradation and superimpositions, the film enraptures as much as it evades easy intellectual grasp. The one film of the festival that felt most like a half-remembered dream.
Ferri’s teasing, playful Dog, Dear appropriates the filmed record of a Soviet zoological experiment in the 1940s in which scientists impart motor functions to different parts of a dead dog. In the incantatory soundtrack, a woman – presumably the animal’s owner – repeatedly conveys messages to it, with each of them prefaced by the titular term of endearment. Ferri’s film would serve sufficiently as a blunt political allegory about the dysfunction of communism, but I think it’s probably fashioning itself as a metaphysical question: the dog might well be kicking but is he alive? His physical resurrection will not be accompanied by a restoration of consciousness. He will not respond to his master’s voice.
Put together from footage apparently shot over twenty years at a Thai army officer’s residence, Tesprateep’s film shows us four conscripts working in the general’s garden. We witness their camaraderie, their obvious boredom, the empty bravado in entrapping small animals and intimidating each other. The misuse of power by the officer in employing these youth to mow his lawn reflects a broader militaristic hierarchy, as is attested by the youths’ casual violence towards the animals and their brutal torturing of a prisoner. Endless, Nameless recalls Claire Denis in its emphasis on military performativity and Werner Herzog in its juxtaposition of idyllic nature and seething violence, all the while retaining an 
In Fictitious Force, Widmann incidentally poses himself the age-old challenge of ethnological cinema; how to film the Other without imposing your own worldview on him? The filmmaker smartly takes the Chris Marker route, avoiding explanatory voiceover for the rather physical Hindu ritual he photographs and instead holding it at a slightly mystifying – but never exoticizing – distance. Widmann’s film is about this distance, the chasm between experience and knowledge that prevents the observer from experiencing what the observed is experiencing, however understanding he might be. Fictitious Force’s considered reflexivity carefully circumvents the all-too-common trap of conflating the subjectivities of the photographer and the photographed.
Fashioned out of footage that the artist shot during his visit to the titular natural reserve in Ontario, Fish Point comes across as an impressionist cine-sketch of the locale. The film opens with Daichi Saito-esque silhouettes of trees against harsh pulsating light – near-monochrome shots that are then superimposed over a slow, green-saturated pan shot of a section of a forest. This segment gives way to a passage with purely geometric compositions consisting of alternating browns and greens and strong horizontals and verticals. Forms change abruptly and tints become more diffuse and earthly. We are finally shown the sea and the horizon, with a rough map of the area overlaid on the imagery.
A music video for a song that reportedly riffs on a holy chant and the traditional cry of the local ragman, Ye’s film starts out with shots of old women and men lip-syncing to the titular melody before turning increasingly darker. The rag picker of the poem progresses from accepting material refuse to buying off diseases, emotional traumas and even intolerable human characters. Ye builds the video using shots both documentary and voluntarily-performed that portray everyday life in Taiwan as being poised between tradition and modernity. The junkman of the film then becomes a witness to all that the society rejects and, hence, to all that it stands for.
Set in a suburban Mumbai slum, Bhargava’s film takes a look into one of the reportedly many carrom clubs in the area where young boys come to play, smoke and generally indulge in displays of precocious masculinity. Where Imraan, the 11-year-old manager of the club, seems reticent before the camera, his peers and clients are much more willing to perform adulthood in front of the filming crew. While some of them are acutely aware of the intrusive presence of the camera, urging their friends not to project a bad image of the country, the film itself seems indifferent about the ethics of filming these youngsters, asking them condescending questions with a problematic, non-committal non-judgmentalism.
Völter’s visually pleasing and relaxing silent film is a compilation of scientific documents of cloud movement over the Mount Fuji recorded from a static observatory by Japanese physicist Masanao Abe in the 1920s and 1930s. Abe’s problem was also one of cinema’s primary challenges: to study the invisible through the visible; in this case, to examine air currents through cloud patterns. The air currents take numerous different directions and these variegated views of the mountain situate the film in the tradition of Mt. Fuji paintings. The end product is a James Benning-like juxtaposition of fugitive and stable forms, a duet between rapidly changing and unchanging natural entities.
The most narrative film of the competition, Memorials situates itself in the tradition of 21st century Slow Cinema with its elliptical exposition, stylized longueurs, (a bit too) naturalistic sound and its overall emphasis on Bazinian realism. A young man revisits his father’s house long after his passing and starts discovering him through the objects of his everyday use, while a dead fish becomes the instrument of meditation and grieving. Though rather conventional in its workings, Memorials offers the details in its interstices fairly subtly and touches upon the usual themes of inter-generational inheritance and posthumous rapprochement, while also gesturing towards a necessary break from the past.
Punprutsachat’s work is a straightforward document of the protracted rescue of a water buffalo from a man-made well on a sultry summer afternoon by dozens of village folk. Shot with a handheld digital camera and employing mostly on-location sound, the film presents to us the efforts of the villagers in chipping away at the edifice, restraining the animal from agitating and finally allowing it to go back to its herd. Natee Cheewit attempts to encapsulate the idea of eternal struggle between man and animal and, more broadly, between nature and civilization. The remnants of the demolished pit and the dog wandering about it are reminders of this sometimes symbiotic, sometimes destructive interaction.
Night Watch is reportedly set in the days following the military coup in Thailand in May, 2014 – a period of state repression dissimulated by triumphalist propaganda about reigning happiness. Chulphuthiphong’s debut film showcases one quiet night during this period. Jacques Tati-esque cross-sectional shots of isolated apartments and office spaces show the citizenry complacently cloistered in their domestic and professional spaces, much like the sundry critters that crawl about in the night. Someone surfs through television channels. Most of them are censored, the rest telecast inane entertainment. Night Watch underscores the mundanity and the ordinariness of the whole situation, which is the source of the film’s horror.
A rapid editing rhythm approximating the audiovisual assault of the information age, a visual idiom weaving together anime, pencil-drawing and Pink Film aesthetic and a soundscape consisting of reversed audio and noise of clicking mice and shattering glass defines Ouchi’s high-strung portrayal of modern adolescent anxieties. In a progressively sombre, cyclic series of events, a teenager navigates the real and virtual worlds that are haunted by sex and death around her. Ouchi’s pulsating, mutating forms and her preoccupation with the hyper-sexualization of visual culture are reminiscent of 
One of the high points of the festival, Scrapbook consists of videograms shot in 1967 in a care centre in Ohio for autistic children with commentary by one of the patients, Donna, recorded (and curiously re-performed by a voiceover artist at Donna’s request) in 2014. Donna’s words – indeed, her very use of the pronoun ‘I’ – not only attest to the vast improvement in her personal mental condition, but also throw light on the psychological mechanisms that engender a self-identity. For Donna and the other children-patients filming each other, the act of filming and watching substitutes for their thwarted mirror-stage of psychological development, helping them experience their own individuality, reclaim their bodies. Bracing stuff.
Canadian animator Leslie Supnet’s hand-drawn animation piece is an extension of her previous work 
According to the program notes, the project brings together a real-life DJ who has lost her job after the coup d’etat in 2014 and an actual illegal immigrant boy from Myanmar at a secluded pond in the woods to allow them to do what they can’t in real life. We see the DJ perform for the camera, talking with imaginary strangers, giving and playing unheard songs, while the boy is content in tossing stones into the moss-covered pond. Like a structural film, The Asylum, alternates between the DJ’s ‘calls’ and the boy’s quiet alienation, taking occasional albeit unmotivated excursions into impressionist image-making, to weave a vignette about ordinary people made fugitives overnight.
A Kiarostami-like narrative minimalism characterizes Radjamuda’s naturalistic sketch in digital monochrome of a lazy holiday afternoon. A young boy perched near the window of his house engages in a series of self-absorbed activities, while actions quotidian and dramatic, including a hinted domestic conflict, wordlessly unfold around him off-screen. A series of shallow-focus shots rally around a wide-angle master shot of the backyard to establish clear spatial relations. Literally and metaphorically set at the boundary between the inside and the outside of the house – home and the world – Radjamuda’s film is a pocket-sized paean to childhood’s privilege of insouciance and to the transformative power of imagination.
The shadow of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work is strongest in Kapadia’s three-part work about the cycles of life, death and reincarnation and the interaction between mankind and nature, between the real and the surreal. Set in various regions of India and in multiple languages and shot predominantly between dusk and dawn, the film has a beguiling though mannered visual quality to it, with its appeal predicated on primal, elemental evocations of the supernatural. While Kapadia’s superimposition of line drawings on shot footage to depict man’s longing for and transformation into nature demands attention, the film itself seems derivative and a bit too enamoured of its influences.
A potential companion piece to Porumboiu’s 
At least as formally innovative as Rithy Panh’s 
Wind Castle opens with a complex composition made of an unfinished (or destroyed) building behind a burnt crater, with the moon in full bloom. We are somewhere in the Indian hinterlands, a brick manufacturing site tucked inside large swathes of commercial plantations. Basu’s camera charts the territory in precise, X-axis tracking shots that form a counterpoint to the verticality of the trees. Noise from occasional on-location radios and trucks fill the soundtrack. A surveyor studies the area and trees are marked. ‘Development’ is perhaps around the corner. But the rain gods arrive first. Basu’s quasi-rural-symphony paints an atmospheric picture of quiet lives closer to and at the mercy of nature.
The Seventh Art 