Programme preview I 47th edition
Each year, Cinéma du réel brings together the filmmakers behind contemporary documentary production around the globe. Through its programme, the festival throws light on the formal developments and experiments affecting documentary filmmaking in connection with the history of film. A selection of rare or unreleased films, questioning the state of the world, to be discovered in the cinemas of the Latin Quarter.
Competition
The festival features French premieres of the most outstanding international documentary productions as well as world premieres putting the spotlight on the French documentary scene.
The selection will be unveiled on 11 February.
First window
A selection of filmmakers’ documentary debuts, in partnership with Mediapart, to sound out the future of documentary filmmaking.
Rendez-vous with four filmmakers in reaction
Ryusuke Hamaguchi: survive, they say
Upon graduating from film school in 2011, Hamaguchi – Senses (2015), Drive My Car (2021) or Evil does not exist (2024) – directs a documentary triptych, the Töhoku Trilogy, with survivors of the 2011 tsunami. In this early work, the self-narrative already emerges as a key element of his cinema.
Wang Bing: “Made in China“
Going against the narrative of the ‘Chinese economic miracle’, Wang Bing has been examining the repercussions of the changes in contemporary China on individuals and their lifestyles for the last twenty years. In his Youth trilogy, the last two parts of which will be shown in avant-première, he immerses us in the micro-manufacturing workshops of the town of Zhili, near Shanghai, with young workers aged 17 to 20.
Julia Loktev: counterinformation
Julia Loktev was born in St Petersburg, Russia, and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. Winner of the Cinéma du réel Grand Prix in 1998 for Moment of Impact, she now returns with My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, in which she follows her Russian journalist friends as they grapple with their country’s repressive politics. ‘The world you are about to see no longer exists’, warns Loktev in the very first minutes. For there was no way of knowing, when filming began in 2021, that she would be in a privileged position to observe Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the terrible repression that followed against any dissenting voice.
In Ghassan Salhab’s workshop
In Lebanon, which he doesn’t leave, the director of – among others – Phantom Beirut (1998), Terra Incognita (2002) and The Valley (2014), documents, describes and analyses through cinema, the present of the country and the region as a whole. We’ll be following in real time the reflections of a filmmaker who, day after day, attempts to make a gesture, a thought, a shot, a text. Participative sessions, open to all.
And more…
Festival conversations /// Popular Front(s) /// Special screenings: previews, rare and unreleased films… //// ParisDOC, the festival’s industry platform