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.
While multiple films this year about old age have presented it as a time of reckoning, Kore-eda’s European project The Truth offers an honest, rigorous and profoundly generous picture of life’s twilight. In a career-summarizing role, Catherine Deneuve plays a creature of surfaces, a vain actress who struts in leopard skin and surrounds herself with her own posters. Her Fabienne is a pure shell without a core who can never speak in the first person. She has written an autobiography, but it’s a sanitized account, a reflection of how her life would rather have been. “Truth is boring”, she declares. Responding to her daughter Lumir’s (Juliette Binoche) complaint that she ignored her children for work, she bluntly states that she prefers to be a good actress than a good person. Behaviour precedes intent in the mise en abyme of Kore-eda’s intricate monument to aging, as performance becomes a means of expiation and a way of relating to the world. A work overflowing with sensual pleasures as well as radical propositions, The Truth rejects the dichotomy between actor and role, both in the cinematic and the existential sense. In the end, Fabienne and her close ones come together as something resembling a family. That, assures Kore-eda’s film, is good enough.
The across-the-board success of Parasite invites two possible inferences: either that the cynical logic of capital can steer a searing critique of itself to profitable ends or that this twisted tale of upward ascension appeals to widely-held anxiety and resentment. Whatever it is, Bong Joon-ho’s extraordinary, genre-bending work weds a compelling social parable to a vital, pulsating form that doesn’t speak to current times as much as activate something primal, mythical in the viewer. With a parodic bluntness reminiscent of the best of seventies cinema, Bong pits survivalist working-class resourcefulness with self-annihilating bourgeois prejudice and gullibility, the implied sexual anarchy never exactly coming to fruition. He orchestrates the narrative with the nimbleness and legerdemain of a seasoned magician, the viewer’s sympathy for any of the characters remaining contingent and constantly forced to realign itself from scene to scene. Parasite is foremost a masterclass in describing space, in the manner in which Bong synthesizes the bunker-like shanty of the working-class family with the high-modernist household of their upper-class employers, tracing direct metaphors for the film’s themes within its topology. It’s a work that progresses with the inevitability of a boulder running down a hill. And how spectacularly it comes crashing.
Vitalina Varela is an emblem of mourning. In recreating a harrowing moment in her life for the film, the middle-aged Vitalina, who comes to Lisbon following her husband’s death, instils her loss with a meaning. It’s a film not of political justice but individual injustice, the promise to Vitalina the that men in their resignation and madness have forgotten. It’s also a bleak, relentless work of subtractions. What is shown is arrived at by chipping away what can’t/won’t be shown, this formal denuding reflective of the increasing dispossession of the Cova da Moura shantytown we see in the film. Costa’s Matisse-like delineation of figure only suggests humans, enacting the ethical problems of representation in its plastic scheme. The film is on a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the viewer hardly perceives that, the localized light reducing the visual field to small pockets of brightness. Vitalina is a film of and about objects, whose vanishing echoes the community’s dissolution and whose presence embodies Vitalina’s assertive spirit. Her voice has its own materiality, her speech becomes her means to survival. Costa’s film is a vision of utter despair, a cold monument with an uplifting, absolutely essential final shot. A dirge, in effect.
The bird island of the title is a utopian place, a refuge for those wounded or cast aside by modernity. For sixty minutes, we are invited to look at five people working silently alongside each other in a bird shelter, tending to birds dazed by the airport next door. They don’t ask where these birds come from, nor do they expect them to leave soon. They simply treat the feathered creatures, re-habituate them into the wild and set them free. The reclusive Antonin, the new employee, is one such bird too, and his social healing at the shelter is at the heart of the film. Bird Island is full of violence, natural and man-made, all of which it treats with stoic acceptance, but it’s a work primarily about the curative power of community, the capacity for individuals to coexist in mutual recognition of each other’s frailties. In that, it’s the Catholic film par excellence, an allegory of the origin of religion. It’s also an exceptionally relaxing film to look at. Observing the participants absorbed like Carthusian monks in their individual tasks, even while working in a group, places the viewer on the same meditative state.
Without question, Heimat is a Space in Time is the best 3½-hour film of the year. Heise’s sprawling experimental documentary uses largely personal documents—letters sent between family members, handed-down private documents—to evoke a broad history of 20th century Germany. As a narrator reads out the exchanges—Heise’s grandfather trying to reason with the Nazi state against his forced retirement, heart-rending accounts from his Jewish great grandparents describing their impending deportation, letters between his parents who were obliged to be in two different places in DDR—we see quotidian images from current day Germany and Austria, urban and rural. For Heise’s family, always made to justify their own place in the country and to never truly belong, the Germanic idea of Heimat seems positively a fantasy. While he reads out his great grandparents’ descriptions of their increasingly impossible conditions of living, Heise presents a scrolling list of Viennese deportees prepared. We try to look for the inevitable arrival of their names in the alphabetical list, our gaze forever deferred. When they do arrive, it feels arbitrary. In other words, what we hear could well be the story of any of the thousand preceding names. Perhaps all of them.
A worthy heir to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Slits draws its inspiration from quantum physics to explore patently human concerns of loss, grief and memory. The uncertainly principle it offers is a choice between being in this world, awake to the problems of living, and finding meaning in the elsewhere. Physicist Catarina (Roberta Rangel) makes ‘sound-photos’ to study quantum the properties of light. She makes extreme zooms into a digital image to perceive the noise issuing from particular coordinates. These ‘dives’ enable her to listen to conversations from another space-time. Grieving from the loss of her child, Catarina unconsciously attempts to find closure through her research. But trying to inspect the surface of things from too close, she loses sight of her immediate reality; trying to find solace in the objectivity of science, she ends up rediscovering the great lesson of 20th century science (and cinema): that the observer influences the observation. Shot in high-definition digital video, Slits is to this new format what Blow-up was to photography. It locates in the trade-offs of the medium—between details and stability, between richness of palette and noise—visual correlatives to its key idea of quantum uncertainty. A brilliant, sophisticated work of politico-philosophical science fiction.
Of all the recent classical Hollywood riffs in mind, none reinvigorates the B-movie tradition as intelligently or potently as Little Joe. Hausner’s modernist creature feature is a monster movie unlike any other: the dangers of the genetically-modified “happiness” plant that biologist Emily (Alice Woodard) develops is exposed early on, and there’s no triumphal reassertion of mankind to counter its menace. What we get instead is a protracted, total submission of individuality to a hegemony of happiness. Little Joe is many things at once: a multi-pronged attack on the wellness industry straight out of Lanthimosverse, the difficulty of being less than happy in an environment that demands you to be constantly upbeat, the fallout of women artists trying to expunge their maternal complexes in their work and of mothers having to lead double lives. Hausner’s camera appears to have a mind of its own, settling on the space between people, which is what the film is about: the culturally mediated relations between individuals. It’s notable that the titular plant reproduces not biologically but culturally. With its terrific score and work on colour, Hausner turns the cheesecake aesthetic of the film against itself. The result is a film of unusual intellectual density and formal frisson.
In Status and Terrain, the German obsession with documentation and due process is called to testify to the dialectical process of historical remembrance. Adamczewski’s gently moving camera surveys the length and breath of public spaces in the Saxony region, once a Nazi stronghold, now seemingly anaesthetized under liberal democracy. Official communication, bureaucratic reports and private testimonies read on the voiceover incriminate the buildings and monuments we see on screen, revealing their role in power struggles through the ages. Just as the documents vie for a narrative on the soundtrack, ideologies once thought dead and buried surface to stake their claims on the urban landscape in the present. Adamczewski moves through 80 years of German history non-chronologically, the collage of information pointing to the living, breathing nature of political belief systems. Nazi detention of political opponents in concentration camps, Soviet retribution and blindness to victims of persecution, rise of neo-fascist groups post reunification and the historically indifferent, bulldozing force of current-day neoliberalism play out on the surface of seemingly sedate cities and towns. Status and Terrain is a sober, bracing examination of the manner in which prejudice becomes writ, which in turn becomes history, but also of the way in which this history is contested.
The premise is a throwback to the clichés of the eighties: a group of teenagers at a suburban school prepare for their prom night. But in Taormina’s sure-handed treatment, this banal event assumes a spiritual dimension. In the film’s cubist first half, different groups of boys and girls make their way to the restaurant-turned-dance hall, where they will take part in rites of initiation into adulthood and experience something like a religious communion. And then, right after this VHS-ready high, a void descends over the film, turning its raptures into a mourning, not for those who have left this small-town existence but for those left behind: disaffected youth drift about the town or going through robotic social rituals, devoid of magic or warmth. It’s a work evidently deriving from personal experience, but one that’s refracted through a formalist lens. The strength of Ham on Rye is not the depth of its ideas, but the vigour of its prose. Taormina’s manifestly personal style emphasizes the surface of things, the idiosyncratic shot division focuses on gestures and minor physical details to construct scenes, and the eclectic sense of music imposes a global consciousness on a narrative that is otherwise extremely local.
“Cinephiles are sick people”, said Truffaut. Frank Beauvais agrees. Following his father’s passing and a breakup, Beauvais shut himself up in his house in a trou perdu in Eastern France, and watched over 400 films in a period of seven months. Out of this glut, this sickness that Beauvais calls ‘cinéfolie’, came Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, a film about looking, made wholly of clips from these 400 movies. Through a rapid, self-aware voiceover, the filmmaker reflects on his self-imposed isolation, his panic attacks, the poverty that prevents him from changing his lifestyle, his complicated feelings towards with political action, the conservatism of those around him and his relationship with his parents. Beauvais’s film is a record of his malady as well as its cure. In its very existence, it demonstrates what anyone sufficiently sickened by cultural gluttony must’ve felt: that the only way to give meaning to the void of indiscriminate consumption is to produce something out of it. Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is not just a cinephile’s film, filled end to end with references, but the preeminent film about cinephilia, the solipsistic hall of mirrors that Beauvais breaks down and rebuilds inside out.
The Seventh Art 