The Film Verdict. May 4, 2023

Visions du Reel

Weekly Critics’ Choice

Social Themes Triumph in Nyon

This week’s Critics’ Choice picks a handful of stimulating short films from Visions du Réel

VERDICT: Bill Morrison’s latest found footage film uses multiple perspectives to dissect and interrogate the lethal shooting of Harith Augustus in 2018.

Ben Nicholson, May 1, 2023

In the South Shore neighbourhood of Chicago, on 14 July 2018, African-American barber Harith Augustus was shot and killed by a police officer after being stopped on suspicion of carrying a weapon. Over the following year, the shooting was investigated by the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture alongside Chicago’s non-profit journalism organisation, the Invisible Institute. Based on their work, and a wealth of subsequently released footage, Bill Morrison has created his own meticulous analysis of the events in the powerful Incident, which received its world premiere at this year’s edition of Visions du Réel. Full Review

Photo courtesy of Vision du reel

On the banks of Lake Geneva in Nyon, the 54th Visions du Réel came to a close on Sunday. Always host to a wealth of interesting work in the shorter form, Switzerland’s largest documentary festival made no exception this year, premiering more than 30 films in its International Medium Length & Short Film Competition.

The main prize for medium-length films was scooped by Anna Dziapshipa’s Self-Portrait Along

the Borderline, which used archival imagery and personal reflections to investigate the history of Georgia-Abkhazia relations via her own dual nationality. The winner in the shorts category was Losing Ground, made by an anonymous filmmaker in Yangon, Myanmar. It is an address to the city, reflecting on the overwhelming power of the oppressive state apparatus, while holding out hope through individual creativity.

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Losing Ground wasn’t the only film to tackle the febrile nature of the world today and what feels like an interminable battle against heavyhanded authority. One of the section's most emotionally impactful films was Bill Morrison’s Incident, which builds on the work of investigative organisations like Forensic Architecture to tell the story of the fatal shooting of Harith Augustus in Chicago in 2018 via a meticulous montage of surveillance, security and social media footage surrounding the

While the Green Grass Grows directed by Peter Mettler event. Activism via social media was also brought to the fore in Narges Kalhor’s Sensitive Content which seeks to celebrate – and elevate the voices of – those who have demonstrated in Iran since the death of Mahsa Amini in government custody in September 2022.

Also drawn from an online archive is Lam Can-zhao’s Voices in

November, which uses a blank screen to evoke state censorship in China whilst pairing it with a soundscape drawing attention to state violence of various kinds. Lam Can-zhao collected the Special Youth Jury Award for best short film, while the corresponding medium-length award went to Giuseppe Petrusselli’s La Ricerca which attempts to depict the very personal cosmogony of Italian artist Luigi Lineri.

In the wider festival, the top honour – the Grand Jury Prize –went to Peter Mettler’s sweeping diary film While the Green Grass Grows. Other awards were made to Hyun kyung Kim’s Defectors (International Competition), Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse and Quentin L’helgoualc’h’s Knit’s Island, Alan Zhang’s This Woman (both Burning Lights), Nathalie Berger’s Chagrin Valley and Emmanuelle Antille’s The Wonder Way (both National Competition).

– Ben Nicholson

Self-Portrait Along the Borderline directed by Anna Dziapshipa

Losing Ground, Anonymous

HEART OF AN ASTRONAUT

VERDICT: This documentary about astronauts and the doctor that administers to them finds quiet profundity within the mechanics of interplanetary bodies.

Ben Nicholson, April 29, 2023

What is it like to be an astronaut?

The experience is typically described as having a significant impact on all those who

undertake it – people’s perceptions of life have been altered by what some refer to as ‘the overview effect.’ In Jennifer

Rainsford’s captivating documentary Heart of an Astronaut, the film’s subject might be much more firmly rooted in the nature of the bodily experience but it still, through an intimate and physical exploration, touches on or intimates similarly intangible ideas. The film does this by basing its enquiries on the attentive perspective of the physician to the astronauts at the European Space Agency, Dr. Brigitte Godard.

Although the film may begin with blurry images of celestial bodies being brought into focus as Godard recounts her childhood desire to be an astronaut, the film otherwise takes as its primary focus the very human bodies of those preparing to visit, and currently in situ aboard, the International Space Station. The footage moves freely between Earth and orbit, Full Review

ARDENT OTHER

VERDICT: Alice Brygo’s arresting film is an experiential recreation of the crowds massing around the burning Notre-Dame in 2019 and myriad responses to the catastrophic events.

Ben Nicholson, April 24, 2023

“Some fires can’t be put out,” says one of the voices that Alice Brygo’s camera ominously glides past in her strange and evocative

short documentary Ardent Other

The film is created from images captured by the filmmaker in April 2019, as hordes of onlookers

stared in awe and horror as flames engulfed the 850-year-old Notredame du Paris. Brygo has repurposed this footage into both a surreal slow-motion observation of her own, and then a floating tour around and through the enrapt crowd, accompanied by a textured soundscape that seems to eavesdrop on snatches of conversations, or perhaps even delves into personal thoughts, as people wonder about the fire and contemplate its impact.

The film reverses the angle of perspective, taking in not the blaze itself but the expressions of those watching it. It feels somewhat natural to connect the film to Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin – which depicted an audience watching an unseen theatrical performance –though of course, these people are not looking at an artwork, though they may be just as enthralled.

Full Review

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOLUME 3

VERDICT: James Gunn bids farewell to the MCU with a whimper, not a bang.

Alonso Duralde, April 28, 2023 (Originally published April 28 on thefilmverdict.com) Chronic fatigue has set in. The dispiriting Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 writerdirector James Gunn’s last Marvel/Disney project before blasting off to Warner Bros. trades the goofy for the grim in a third-chapter grab for deeper relevance and meaning, but it’s a big misstep. The skillfully executed tonal shifts in the Tom Holland–starring Spider-Man movies demonstrate that this sort of thing can be done, but this time around the Guardians have lost their collective punch.

The film opens in Knowhere, a dingy set that resembles a Blade Runner slum grafted onto an outdoor tourist-trap shopping mall. Reintroducing the ensemble, the action finds team leader Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) in mid-mope, stewing in drunken self-pity after losing girlfriend Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in the course of Avengers: Infinity War. The rest of the team is holding it together: Gamora’s step-sister, the brutal but occasionally deadpan Nebula (Karen Gillan); wisecracking rodent Rocket (voiced by Bradley

Cooper) and sentient tree-creature Groot (Vin Diesel); dimwitted but loyal Drax (Dave Bautista); and antennaed empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff).

Knowhere is abruptly attacked by the powerful Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) son of Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), who vowed revenge during one of several post-credits sequences in Volume 2 and Rocket is injured so badly that he lapses into a coma. His friends can’t do anything to help him without the passcode required to access his heart.

That passcode was placed there by The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji, Gunn’s Peacemaker TV series), a mechanism to protect the proprietary technology used to transform Rocket from a baby raccoon to a walking, talking, thinking experiment, a part of a larger attempt to build a “perfect” civilization. (Of which the Sovereigns Ayesha’s race of gold aliens who resemble walking Oscars were another iteration.)

Full Review

SENSITIVE CONTENT

VERDICT: Upending the online practice of blurring sensitive content, Narges Kalhor’s short documentary celebrates those bravely sharing uncensored images of Iran's recent protests.

Ben Nicholson, May 1, 2023

Narges Kalhor’s Sensitive Content begins with a square image, blurred beyond comprehension, the only sharpness in the image is the icon of an eye crossed out by a diagonal line. This practice, of blurring ‘sensitive content’ on social media, is used in this context as a proxy for state and societal censorship. Across the course of the film, Kalhor uses this symbol, and different scales of visual

obfuscation, to draw attention instead to the people who refuse to be silenced – highlighting and celebrating those that openly share information of violence, intimidation, and oppression at the hands of Iran’s current regime.

The demonstrations that make up the majority of the material Kalhor is working with came after the death of Mahsa Amini while in government custody in September 2022. While the morality police who arrested Amini – for supposedly not wearing her hijab correctly – claims she suffered a heart attack, eyewitnesses assert she was a victim of police brutality. The film incorporates a variety of different examples, either of the civil unrest that has occurred nationwide since the incident or further flagrant acts of state violence. The eye symbol keeps popping back up, sometimes now relieved of the line crossing through it, as though the proliferation of these images online has in some way allowed a veil to be lifted from people’s eyes.

Later on, the eye with the line through it returns, this time placed directly over the blurred images of eyes –presumably of people who have been harmed or even killed during demonstrations. Full Review

AWARDS

96th Academy Awards® Set for March 10, 2024

SUBMISSION DATES

Tuesday, August 15, 2023: First submission dead- line for Animated Short Film, Documentary Feature Film, Documentary Short Film and Live Action Short Film categories

Friday, September 15, 2023: First submission deadline for Animated Feature Film and General Entry categories

Monday, October 2, 2023: Final submission deadline for Documentary Feature Film and International Feature Film categories

Monday, October 16, 2023: Final submission deadline for Animated Short Film, Documentary Short Film and Live Action Short Film categories

Wednesday, November 1, 2023: Final submission deadline for Music (Original Score) and Music (Original Song) categories

Key Dates, Updated Regulations & Rules Announced

FOR MORE DATES AND UPDATED RULES PLEASE CLICK HERE

FILMING

VERDICT: The sumptuously photographed documentary depicts the realities of a location film shoot while ruminating on filmmaking with the help of Robert Bresson.

Ben Nicholson, May 2, 2023

In 2019, documentary filmmaker Samuel Moreno Alvarez followed his compatriot Juan Sebastian Mesa into the Southwestern Antioquia

region of Colombia in order to capture the experience of Mesa shooting his fiction film The Rust An artistic riff on a behind-the

scenes documentary, Alvarez’s resulting medium-length piece, Filming, adorns its patiently observational tone with a selection of quotes extracted from Robert Bresson’s book Notes on the Cinematograph – enriching the act of watching to create a meditation not only on filmmaking but selfexpression and internal reflection. Screening as part of the Burning Lights Competition at Visions du Réel, the verdant environment only serves to amplify Filming’s quietly entrancing milieu.

Many of the sequences in Alvarez’s film are unremarkable in and of themselves. His camera watches the discussions preceding a newly arranged scene, watches crew members lugging equipment through the forest, and watches the prop department preparing the carcass of dead chicken with bright synthetic gore.

Full Review

Locations

Japan USA

Good Burger 2 is being filmed in Rhode Island. The Nickelodeon Studios and Paramount+ movie is scheduled to commence filming on May 18, 2023, in various locations across the Ocean State.

TOHO launches TOHO Tombo Pictures

TOHO Tombo Pictures Inc. is a brand new international production entity which joins the forces of TOHO the legendary production house, home of such giants as Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa, with Georgina Pope, a seasoned Tokyo based producer who understands your needs. The new company will be lead by Shimada Mitsuru who is the current President of Toho Studios.

In a statement, by the representative director and president of Toho, Matsuoko Hiro says, “By establishing a firm dedicated to the needs of the international producers and directors we will assemble a work- force ready to support overseas realtors while contributing to the Japanese film industry and in turn the tourism industry.” Japan does not currently offer locations filming incentives, tax breach or rebate schemes.

Italy

Shooting has kicked off in Rome on limited series The Leopard based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that marks Netflix’s most ambitious Italian original to date. The six-episode epic set against the backdrop of social revolution in 1860s Sicily is to film in Palermo, Syracuse, Catania as well as the Italian capital over the summer.

Switzerland

Filming began on Seasons 3 & 4 of Tschugger in April, continuing until mid-July in several spots in the cantons of Valais, Zurich and Bern. Sophie Toth from Shining Film, based in Zurich, is also producing seasons 3 and 4. Tschugger is a production by Shining Film and TV channel SRF. The broadcast date for the third season is scheduled for the end of 2023.

Ireland

Clean Sweep, a new Irish thriller series starring and executive produced by Charlene McKenna, will debut on RTÉ One and the RTÉ Player on Sunday 14th May. The series is proudly supported by Screen Ireland. Clean Sweep will also air on Sundance Now in the US with ZDF Studios having secured international distribution rights to the show.

Australia

Screen Australia will host Venice Film Festival (La Biennale di Venezia) pre-selector Paolo Bertolin to view new eligible feature films for this year’s festival when he visits Australia in May. Bertolin will be viewing new theatrical drama features of 70 minutes or longer that are available for their world premiere. The official deadlines for submission to the 2023 festival are 15 June for feature films, 1 June for short films and 29 May for XR titles.