20/03/2012 - Switzerland’s largest documentary film festival, an important event in Europe, will be held from April 20 to 27 in Nyon. Here is the programme so far.

Emotions through documentaries. Here, in brief, is the programme for the next Visions du Réel. Luciano Barisone, the event’s director, has insisted that the roughly 110 films to be screened from April 20 to 27 in Nyon, Switzerland, will all make the audience “laugh, cry, and think, [emotions] not exclusively for intellectuals”. The new director is further reaching out to the general public “who, today, watch documentaries more gladly than before”.

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If Switzerland has no less than 23 selected films in this year’s programme, France, Germany, and Belgium will be equally well represented with films in practically all of the festival’s sections. The international competition for feature-length documentaries especially reflects this: between Après le silence, ce qui est dit n'existe pas by Vanina Vignal (France, Roumania), Comme des lions de pierre à l'entrée de la nuit by Olivier Zuchuat (France, Greece, Switzerland), Damas, au péril du souvenir by Marie Seurat (France, Syrie), De Wetten van Matthijs by Marc Schmidt (Holland), Die Lage by Thomas Heise (Germany), Ein Versprechen by Peter Levin (Germany), Kovasikajuttu by JP Passi and Jukka Kärkkäinen (Finland), Le thé ou l'électricité by Jérôme Le Maire (Belgium), Six faces d'une brique by Damien Monnier (France), The dark side of the sun by Carlo Hintermann (Italy), Vắng Bóng by Martin Otter (Germany) and Where the condors fly by Carlos Klein (Switzerland, Germany, Chile), European cinema is to make up a good 95% of the offerings.

The 2012 Visions du Réel will also be all about transition: “The world’s values are changing and cinema can only witness this,” said Luciano Barisone at the event’s press conference. “Memory and hope are part of this transition. On one hand, we have the end of the twentieth century’s utopias and certainties, and, on the other, the birth of a feeling of revolt and other possible utopias, more modest and attainable. Between the two, people suffer, fight, dream, and have fun. They still want to live.»

(Translated from French)