There’s little doubt that Cinéma du réel, Paris, continues to offer an expansive, challenging programme (and definition) of documentary cinema, one that is as formally adventurous as it is alert to the iniquities and bloody upheavals of our world. Working through this year’s competition lineup, I was, however, struck by the considerable amount of space the festival has secured for works of an opposite kind, films that seem to take deliberate flight from the tumult of the times and find refuge in a serene, rarefied realm beyond politics and history.
To be sure, the festival is still dominated by urgent, pointedly political work, with special sections dedicated to Palestine, Eco-feminism and “Artists and the peoples’ struggle”. Even within the competition, titles such as With Love and Rage (which revisits a feminist organization’s picketing of the Pentagon in 1980), El León (an elliptical commemoration of those killed by the military in Colombia in the 1980s and 90s) and Narrative (centring on a workshop regrouping the family members of those killed in the pro-democracy protests in Thailand in 2010) grapple directly with specific political moments.
Yet, for all the confrontation Cinéma du réel enables with the sordid state of things, this year’s competition section also opens up a vast space for calm and contemplation, for beauty beyond all the bloodshed.
Perhaps no other work embodies this transition better than Ben Russell’s Another Earth. This 13-minute film begins in a kind of tautology: a closeup of a mouth uttering a short text about humanity’s long history of living underground, an experience forever lost after the industrial age. As the actor repeats the text with minor hiccups, the film incrementally layers new visual information over her face — colour-saturated shots of caves, a child playing by the lake, fingers doomscrolling through harrowing war news and, finally, glimpses of protests — suggesting that, underneath layers of civilizational debris, may lurk primal instincts of the Platonic cave. “Time is not what it is, but how it is felt”, go the final words of the looping text. The idyll of the child by the lake indeed evokes a sense of time starkly different from the accelerated sensorial assault that the omniscience of contemporary life enables. Is it possible, desirable to return to subterranean bliss?
A response may be suggested by some of the other titles in competition: meditative landscape films, pastoral portraits, vehemently non-didactic essays and durational experiments that have the salutary effect of calming the viewer’s nerves.
Among the more rewarding entries is Sharon Lockhart’s Windward, set on the scarcely populated Fogo Island, located near the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The film is something of an extension, a chromatic inversion of Lockhart’s mid-length Eventide (2022). Where that single-shot featurette took place under the twilight skies, its actor-participants piercing the dark frame with their torchlights, this new work unfolds entirely in daylight. Comprising twelve static shots of about five minutes each, the film also echoes Pine Flat (2006) in that it centres on children or young adults engaged in leisurely, summertime activities outdoors.
In extremely long, wide shots that turns them into little more than mobile pixels, we watch the youngers take a swim, chase each other, fly kites, walk on stilts or just sit quietly on the rocky coasts of the island. The landscape is breathtaking, particularly in Lockhart’s painterly composition of them, but it’s the human elements that invigorate it. Our gaze is locked on the children’s activity, which is both a vehicle of chaos within a stately pictorial order and a dynamic formal element that activates the frame. This is most spectacularly felt in a shot where a girl feeds a flock of seagulls on a rock. The birds lunge at the fish that the young woman tosses one by one, and their moving mass keeps shifting the visual centre of the shot to thrilling effect.
But the children in the film are, above all, a source of emotional warmth. Very simply, the sight of boys and girls, frequently dressed in white, enjoying themselves in sunny nature is deeply gratifying. As they say, not a phone in sight, just people living in the moment… As always with this filmmaker, there is a touch of theatre beneath the apparent spontaneity of action. Lockhart often captures the children’s actions midway, but ends the shots just after they have exited the frame — in a manner that recalls the trains in James Benning’s RR (2007). Despite the overwhelming presence of nature, man, quite literally, becomes the measure of things in Windward.
Rebecca Digne’s Barefoot Maria operates in an adjacent thematic territory, but limits its scope to one young girl. Eight-year-old Maria leads an enchanted childhood in the Tuscan countryside, with cats, dogs, geese and horses for playmates, in a lovely country house that is marked for eviction by its new owners. Digne pays remarkable attention to Maria’s leisure-time behaviour (and leisure is all that she seems to have), shaping the material to give us the impression that she lives alone in this heavenly demesne. She also lends Maria a Super-8 camera, and the girl regularly sends back tapes that she has filmed of her own life. What emerges from this intergenerational correspondence is a charming, almost timeless picture of a childhood at once insular and privileged, untouched by the anxieties and demands of modern life. Maria grapples with boredom, invents ingenious ways to pass time and manages to achieve perfect harmony with her environment just as it is taken away from her.
The horrors of the world are scarcely to be seen in Matter of Britain too. Peter Treherne’s enigmatic, rapturously shot debut feature unfolds in an unnamed, lushly wooded village in the south of England. Vignettes from everyday life in the village – farming, deer hunting, sheep rearing, churchgoing, cattle trading — are interspersed with fictional passages in which the villagers enact episodes from Arthurian legend, particularly the Knights’ quest for the Holy Grail, in full costume. Realized in a high-theatrical style, and bathed in Caravaggian darkness, these passages monumentalize ordinary lives in a manner that recalls Roberto Minervini’s use of rural Southerners in The Damned (2024). Treherne’s film doesn’t expound on this strange mix of fantasy and ethnographic document, although an early radio soundbite about climate change-induced agrarian crisis hints at a possible connection to the Holy Grail’s capacity to restore barren lands. Does the Quest represent a living myth for the villagers, a collective, subconscious yearning? Are they looking for some kind of deliverance? Matter of Britain doesn’t explain.
Several titles in the competition take this refusal of discursivity to its furthest limits, almost to the point of unintelligibility — a tendency that has become increasingly common in experimental documentary, both in the fly-on-the-wall and the essay traditions. Presented without context or comment, large parts of these ‘slow’, solemn films come across like unprocessed inventories of found images that ask the viewers to make what they will of them.
That’s perhaps why I found Juliette Achard’s Labore Nobile appealing in its openness, sincerity and capacity for commitment. The film is a fairly dense, focused treatise on the evolution of labour and industry as seen through the changing fortunes of Saint-Nazaire, a port town in Northern France. The film’s lucid voiceover is conceived as a sort of letter to a future where work has ceased to have the meaning it has always had in human history, and the narrative is completed by interviews with people working in different sectors of Saint-Nazaire.
While the filmmaker takes us through the economic history of the town — dominated by heavy industries such as ship building and aircraft assembly that have proven to be increasingly indifferent to worker rights and public health — she also weaves in short, poetic monologues performed by its blue-collar residents. Labore Nobile (which translates to “Ennobling through work”, not free of the ominous echoes of Arbeit macht frei) makes many small inventions within the framework of a classic essay film. Despite specific subject matter and a limited geography of focus, Achard manages to undertake considerable formal and thematic digressions, pushing a traditional form from within in the vein of Harun Farocki. Her film amply demonstrates Luc Moullet’s maxim that “thirty square kilometres or a little more is enough to know the whole world, to have all its keys.”
What comprises the blight of modern life? The reverse shot, answers Bruno Dumont in his scorching new dramedy about celebrity news reporter France, played by a dazzling Léa Seydoux, who cannot help but make it about herself in every story she does. Fresh off two films on 
An apartment evermore waiting to be occupied, letters responding to inquiries not heard, a voice never embodied in the image: Pereda’s five-minute short is a haunting, haunted tribute to the late Chantal Akerman that is structured around absence and substitution. We hear Pereda replying to fictitious queries by the Belgian filmmaker about renting out his sister’s apartment in Mexico City, and we see his sister readying the apartment, moving out paintings or clearing foliage from the skylight. In the film’s robust organization, Pereda, his sister and Akerman become mediums, connecting links in each other’s (after)lives: Pereda, unseen, serving as a middleman between the apartment owner and the impossible future tenant; his sister, unheard, taking the place of Akerman who will never feature in Pereda’s film; and Akerman herself, unseen and unheard, bringing the siblings together in a non-existent real estate deal. In an act of respect and love, Dear Chantal creates a physical space for Akerman to continue to exist, even if not in flesh and blood, just as 
How would Lubitsch do it? Well, if the old master were a contemporary filmmaker, ‘it’ would probably resemble Koberidze’s off-kilter, disarming romantic comedy about two lovers-to-be who work at a shop around the corner without recognizing each other all summer. What Do We See is obviously designed to please, but there is never a sense that it panders to its audience. Like the best storytellers, Koberidze knows that pleasure can be deepened by deferring gratification, and to this end, his film takes surprising excursions away from its central story, restarting at will and relegating its lead couple to the margin as though reposing faith in destiny to bring them together. This vast negative space of the narrative clarifies the larger objective of the film, which is to integrate its characters into the landscape of the ancient town of Kutuisi, whose faces and places, ebbs and flows, become the central subject. Pinning down the fable-like story on the voiceover allows the director to employ a complex, highly unusual visual syntax—that nevertheless derives from classical Hollywood cinema—without disorienting the viewer. The film involves magic, but Koberidze demonstrates that a towel flying through the frame can be as enrapturing as the most outlandish fairy tales.
The title says it all. Loznitsa’s new documentary represents a modulation of style for the filmmaker. Where his found footage work so far dropped the viewer into specific historical events in medias res, without much preparation, Babi Yar. Context offers a broader picture. With the help of archival material, but also uncharacteristic intertitles, the film details the events leading up to, and following, the Babi Yar Massacre of September 1941, where over 33,000 Jews were killed over two days in the eponymous ravine in Kiev. We see Ukrainian citizens welcoming the occupying Nazi forces with enthusiasm and collaborating in the persecution of their Jewish compatriots. In an illustration of the failure of archival, the massacre itself isn’t represented except in photographs of its aftermath. Loznitsa’s shocking film is a rousing J’accuse! directed at his nation, at the willingness of its citizens in enabling genocide, at the amnesia that allowed for the valley to be turned into an industrial dumping ground. Loznitsa’s newfound desire to contextualize his material should be construed less as a loss of faith in images to speak ‘for themselves’ than as a critical acknowledgement of their power to deceive. After all, the Red Army is welcomed with comparable pomp after they liberate Kiev, this formal continuity with the reception of the Nazis concealing a crisis of content.
The spectre of Harun Farocki hovers over Herdies and Götmark’s excellent documentary about war, technology and the production of images. A meditation on Western attitudes to armed conflict, Bellum unfolds as an anthology of three human interest stories: a Swedish engineer involved in designing an AI-powered military drone that will take autonomous decisions on bombing a perceived target, a war veteran in Nevada suffering from PTSD and having trouble reintegrating into civilian life, a photojournalist from the East Coast who covers the aftermath of the Afghan war. Well-meaning though these individuals might be, their lives and work are marked by a certain guilt surrounding the fact of war. This is evident in the case of the vet, but the photographer’s own activity may not be untouched by a liberal sense of culpability about her country’s interventions in Afghanistan. The engineer’s efforts to bypass the human factor of war, too, is an attempt to eradicate feelings of guilt about liquidating an enemy, which, the film’s narrator notes, is the only real restraining force in armed conflict. Bellum cogently points out the ways in which technology—of training, of intervention—increasingly eliminates human fallibility from the equation of war, for as Colonel Kurtz put it, “it’s judgment that defeats us.”
I don’t know if Bruno Dumont and Paul Schrader saw each other’s films this year, but I’m certain they would both have much to say to one another. If 
Even if we are done with the 20th century, suggests Sīmanis’ singular, absurd period comedy, the 20th century isn’t yet done with us. When Hans, an opportunistic doorman at a Riga hotel, is falsely implicated in a bombing, he flees the Latvian capital to shuttle from one European city to another. The Europe of 1913 that Hans traverses is less a real geography than an abstract zone of competing political currents. War is around the corner, and there are several groups trying to influence the course of history. Zealous ideologues seek to entice and co-opt him, subjecting him to what Louis Althusser called “interpellation.” All through, Hans fights hard to follow his own moral compass, flee subjecthood and retain his individuality. A historical picaresque, Sīmanis’ film is interested in the singularity of this particular juncture in Western history—a point at which fin de siècle optimism about technology and human rationality came crashing against the reality of trench warfare—where countless isms sought to impose their own vision on the world. It would seem that Sīmanis views Latvia of the early 20th century as something of an ideological waystation, an unstable intellectual field where free radicals like Hans couldn’t help but be neutralized. And that vision isn’t without contemporary resonance.
Maria Speth’s expansive documentary about a batch of preteen students, mostly of an immigrant background, in a public school in Stadtallendorf, Hessen, is a classroom film that achieves something special. Remaining with the children for almost its entire four-hour runtime allows it to individuate them, to look at them as independent beings with their own skills, desires and prejudices, just as their charismatic teacher-guide-philosopher Dieter Bachmann adopts a different approach to each of his pupils. For Bachmann, it would seem, whatever the students accomplish academically during the year is of secondary importance. He knows that he is dealing with a group with an inchoate sense of self: first as pre-adolescents, then as new immigrants. Consequently, he spends a great deal of effort in giving them a sense of community, creating a space where they can be themselves. At the same time, the classroom is a social laboratory where new ideas are introduced and the children brought to interrogate received opinion, all under Bachmann’s paternal authority. Speth insists on the particularity of these individuals and there is no sense that our star teacher is indicative of the schooling system in Germany at large. Bachmann is an exception, and in his exceptionalism lies a promise, a glimpse of how things could be.
It’s an ingenious, wholly cinematic premise: estranged from family and friends, a sound engineer spends her nights at her film studio until she starts to experience a lag between what she sees and what she hears. Juanjo Giménez’s absorbing psychological thriller riffs on this setup, weaving its implications into a coherent character study of a young woman out of sync with her life. The result contains some very amusing set pieces constructed around the delay between sound and image, but also one of the most sublime romantic scenes of all time, one that begins with rude abandonment and ends at a silent movie show. Marta Nieto is brilliant as the unnamed protagonist who withdraws into a shell and then reconnects with herself and the world. She brings a fierce independence to the character that nuances its vulnerability. Its claustrophobic premise notwithstanding, Out of Sync feels like a very open work, integrated gracefully with the urban landscape of beautiful Barcelona. Watching the film in 2021, when so much of real-world interaction has been rendered into digital images and sounds, using Bluetooth speakers with their own latency to boot, is an uncanny experience.
Ambitious to a fault, American artist Jordan Lord’s new work is nearly unwatchable. Yet it bends the documentary form like few films this year. Shared Resources is a home movie made over a considerable period of time, presented in scrambled chronology. We learn that Lord’s father was a debt collector fired by his bank, that his health is deteriorating due to diabetes, that the family lost most of its possessions in the Hurricane Katrina and that they had to declare bankruptcy shortly after Lord’s acceptance into Columbia University. All this material is, however, offered not directly but with a voiceover by Lord and his parents describing the footage we see, as though intended for the visually challenged, and two sets of subtitles, colour-coded for diegetic and non-diegetic speech, seemingly oriented towards the hearing disabled. In having his parents comment on images from rather difficult episodes in their lives, the filmmaker gives them a power over what is represented. Through all this, Lord initiates an exploration of debt in all its forms and shapes: paternal debt towards children, filial debt towards parents, the debt of a documentary filmmaker towards their subjects, one’s debt to their own body, the fuzzy line between love and indebtedness. This is an American film with an Asian sensibility.
The Seventh Art 