Barisone unveils his Visions du Réel
After last year’s departure of Jean Perret (director) and Gabriela Bussmann (assistant director and market manager), who had headed the event together for 16 years, it could be guessed that the (The article continues below - Commercial information)
Among these changes, the complete transformation of the competitive sections is obviously arousing the most curiosity. “Until now, the line-up revolved around the International Competition and the following sections: Regards Neufs, Helvétiques, Investigations, Tendances, Reprocessing Reality, Fictions du Réel and First Steps”, explained Barisone. “For my part, I wanted to focus on the strength of the International Competition, which is now divided into three categories each composed of 18 films: Features, Medium-length Films and Shorts.”
According to Perret’s successor, this refocusing is intended to boost interest in Visions du Réel from directors and producers. Among the titles selected in the three sections are the features Solar System by Germany’s Thomas Heise; Alpi by Italian photographer-artist Armin Linke; and Abendland [+see also:
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film profile] by Austria’s Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Medium-length films include French director Hugues Le Paige’s Le Prince et Son Image and Dutch helmer Boris Gerrets’s People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am.
Another important new addition is the inclusion of films unreleased in Switzerland but not necessarily elsewhere. “Some fine films, which don’t meet the criteria for general release but deserve to be shown, are programmed in the État d’Esprit section, which includes about 20 movies that are at once ‘mainstream’ and ‘new discoveries’”, said Barisone. In this section, viewers will find several unmissable titles, including Gianfranco Rosi’s El Sicario, Room 164 [+see also:
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film profile], which attracted attention at the latest Venice Mostra; The Co(te)lette Film by the too-rarely-seen Mike Figgis; and Jon Foy’s Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, which won acclaim at Sundance this year.
Two workshops are planned: one focusing on European auteur cinema with Spanish director José Luis Guerín, the other on American visual art with Jay Rosenblatt.
The programme also includes two tributes aimed at discovering young talents. The first will be dedicated to Brazilian filmmaker Marília Rocha, the second to Italian director Giovanni Cioni, who trained in Belgium.
(Translated from French)
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