The out-of-competition programme confronts contemporary documentary cinema with its history and reflects the diversity of filmmakers’ approaches. The public is invited to explore the territory of cinema along a different path each year, telling parts of its history.
How can we give meaning to reality through the act of creation? How can we give an account of the present when that present absorbs us, affects us, attacks us? This is a particularly acute question for many filmmakers today, and Cinéma du réel will be addressing it at this 47th edition by inviting four filmmakers to show some of their work in reaction.
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.
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 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 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.