Visions du Réel 2024: Apple Cider Vinegar, The Return of the Projectionist, In Limbo, & More

The Visions du Réel film festival’s greatest singularity is two-fold: its lack of pretense and judicious curatorial eye. The first is, of course, directly related to the other. In centering the festival on the quality, even radicalness, of film praxes, instead of a locus for glamour and business, VdR makes room for cinematic pearls to emerge. Those pearls may not be programmed at any other film festival, and in the quiet Swiss town of Nyon, a 15-minute train ride from Geneva, they amounted to a stunningly consistent lineup.

One of the most sparkling pearls in that lineup was the unclassifiable The Documentary Journey of Madame Anita Conti. Director Louise Hémon’s medium-length film relies on narration from a text by French explorer and photographer Anita Conti’s travel diary from her time on a fishing boat in open sea in 1952—along with an audio interview with Conti, 16mm footage from the expedition, and some of the photographs that she took on the boat.

What’s most moving about the film is its profoundly philosophical sense of “documentation,” despite that word’s associations with neutrality. Conti’s documentation is a work of observation, analysis, and even literature. It’s also made possible via self-implication in the very thing the documentarian documents, as Conti becomes a sailor in order to portray what sailors do.

Through the act of large-scale fishing, Conti reflects on war, the plundering of the ocean, planetary destruction, and asks who the real beasts are. They surely aren’t the sea creatures, she suggests. The film also turns an at-once politcal and poetic gaze to oceonography as the science of all sciences, and, by virtue of the medium, photography as bearing the same multi-valent, or interdisciplinary, ethos. The oceonographer must be an expert in so many sciences—that of wild creatures, of salty water, of the wind. The photographer, too, must double as sailor and artist, archivist of the past and heralder of a future that the real wild beasts will ensure never to come.

It must be noted that the various dimensions that comprise the film only cohere due to the brilliant work of the voiceover actress, Antonia Buresi, who brings Conti’s diaristic musings to life with literary profundity and nuance. Buresi’s performance manages to turn Conti’s annotations into something out of a Marguerite Duras book in its tone and lyricism. A book like The Sailor from Gibraltar, for instance, where the sea is instrumentalized, albeit in much less noxious ways. In Duras’s maritime tale, a woman spends her lifetime on a ship looking for her estranged lover from port to port all over the globe. Here, too, the ship relies on the labor of sailors, but the ocean is a means for love, not the target of beastly human violence.

Sofie Benoot’s Apple Cider Vinegar, another major highlight from the festival, also delves into the idea of humans not as dinosaurs soon to be brought to extintion, but as the deadly meteorite ourselves. It all begins with the kidney stone extracted from the body of the narrator (Siân Phillips), a playful double of the filmmaker. We’re told the kidney stone is made out of minerals that are only found in Antartica, which becomes the cinematic cue for the tracing of materials linking humans to other planetary elements. The film takes the shape of a philosophical journey about the material-metaphorical interconnected-ness of all living and non-living things, one akin to philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s canonical theories of material imagination, where liquidness connects a teardrop to a river, and rain to a mother’s milk.

The film is structured like a global travelogue, as Benoot hunts for evidence of material-imaginary connections between stones, from Cornwell to California, from Palestine to Cape Verde, as in the million-year-old traces of fish hidden inside stones in a quarry where inhabitants inhale stone dust from birth to death, which date back to when stones were immersed in water and thus supple. And it’s held together through one disarming thesis: that stones pretend to be still. But, in fact, they’re just as alive as us, and that they’re a part of us.

Apple Cider Vinegar is an essay film if there ever was one, at the intersection of Chris Marker and Patrício Guzman for its philosophical gravitas and Agnès Varda and Laurie Anderson for its playfulness. It’s an essay film that expands the expectations that we have come to expect from the genre, however nimble those have inherently been. Benoot develops a fresh form for the narrator, who constrantly makes comments about the sounds, images, and editing decisions that comprise Apple Cider Vinegar. It’s as if the film were being forged before our very eyes, the audience privy to the filmmaker/narrator’s creative doubts and instictive reactions to the surprising meanings that arise from her artifact-in-progress.

In the documentary The Return of the Projectionist, director Orkhan Aghazadeh takes cinema back to its most basic elements, as Samid, an aging former projectionist, decides to screen films to locals once again in his rural Azerbaijan village after a long hiatus. The material resources are anything but ideal, but he has an old projector and a passion for cinema. What’s missing is essentially a working light bulb. With some help from a 16-year-old neighbor, Ayaz, he orders the bulb online. But the bulb never seems to arrive.

In the meantime, Samid and Ayaz engage in what we could call intimate acts of transmission, if not filliation, with filmmaking as mediator. The two men, some 50 years of age apart one from one another, meet regularly to plan the film screening, constructing a screen, shooting scenes for Ayaz’s personal animation projects, and taping posters across the village advertising the event. Ayaz becomes Samid’s apprentice, but also the other way around. The young man introduces Samid to new technologies and techniques, and even builds a makeshift projector himself, using a piece of wood, repurposed glass, and his cellphone.

The exchanges between a man who’s only known cinema to be a matter of flimsy film stock latching on to an unpredicably clunky machine and a boy with just as unpredictable internet access make for touching sequences. In fact, the unspoken affection gluing the two together frame even the simplest of shots as an act of love, as when we finally see Samid loading the projector and the sprocketholes get caught ever so perfectly in its teeth. What a miracle cinema is! Samid, whose son recently died in a construction accident, has all the reasons to take in Ayaz as the object of his own projections, adding a profound dimension to the interactions that Aghazadeh captures, with cinema seen as both a common goal and an excuse for togetherness.

With In Limbo, a domestic ethnography in times of war, Alina Maksimenko turns the camera toward herself and her parents. The family takes refuge in their home in Ukraine, stuck between the desire to stay and the urgency of fleeing, as Russian bombs fall increasingly close and the radio feeds listeners generalities about deciding whether to perish by inertia or to perish by action. Across the documentary, they ponder whether or not to go to a bunker, whether or not doing so is part of the pointless theatrics of war, and whether or not it’s worth getting away with a car when gas stations that still have petro have the status of urban legends.

All Maksimenko’s family seems to have left is itself, and the little bit of art that emerges through the cracks of war. Such as the music lessons that the filmmaker’s mother gives over the phone, and the film itself, which Maksimenko’s father insists should be a collaboration between parents and daughter. Guns are for men and the kitchen is for women, he tells his daughter, evoking the notion of cinema as the one place where the genders meet and work together.

There have been lots of documentaries lately set in a hospital. Few have come close to the moving mastery of Our Body and Claire Simon’s non-narcissistic self-implication and rigorous commitment to the subtleties of observation. Alexe Poukine’s Who Cares? takes a very different route in provoking similar emotions, unveiling the horror of finitude and our insistance in disavowing it without ever showing us an ill person. Instead, Poukine observes the role-playing games engaged by hospital staff in preparing young doctors and nurses to deliver bad news and to accompany those for whom death is much closer than a hypothetic horizon.

The film is set in various hospital settings in Belgium, France, and Switzerland, and all we see is therapeutic simulation, with Poukine sparing us from the unbearable realness making up the inegotiable core of Our Body. Never once do we see a real patient in the film because the patient is us. But it’s this absence from the screen that makes Who Cares? so haunting, as we’re forced to place ourselves as the subjects of care, as the objects of death.

Visions du Réel runs from April 12—21.