Édition 2023

Each year, Cinéma du réel ponders upon the state of the documentary, its forms, its developments and the approaches of its filmmakers. This is what lends the festival its exploratory side, making it an ongoing research project. In addition to the screening of this flourishing contemporary international documentary cinema, Cinéma du réel invites us to experience the world and cinema through a plethora of gazes on the world, a plurality of documentary practices and visions other than our own. Because cinema passes from the filmmaker’s mind to the mind of the spectator, it is an art of connivance, even collusion, between filmmaker and spectator, who experiences another imaginary, a universe other than his or her own. But this experience – which is also that of the other or rather the distance separating him or her from me – is singular inasmuch as it also reminds us that we all inhabit the same world. A world to watch without being blinded by the continuous flow of events. And it is perhaps through films that disturb, upend imaginaries, confront other desires, other aspirations, other dreams, that a discontinuity occurs in the inexorable unfolding of real-world events. This discontinuity, which questions, surprises, resists, delights, is what helps us to avoid being blinded and to look at our contemporaries. This is our invitation to the audiences of Cinéma du réel. Catherine Bizern

Varan Vietnam Adventure / Introduction

Varan Vietnam Adventure / Varan Vietnam Student Films

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Thanks to Ateliers Varan, film students and filmmakers – some of whom were working and continue to work for public television – were introduced to Direct Cinema and synchronous sound. Using digital cameras, they have documented the swift changes undergone by Vietnamese society as it embraces capitalism, giving voice to marginalized individuals, populations and ethnic groups.

Training programmes in Hanoï (2004, 2006, 2009, 2014)
Training programme in Hô Chi Min city (2005)
Training programmes in Da Nang (2010, 2011)
Training programmes on the Mékong (2020)

BỤI

NGUYỄN Thị Thùy Quyên

Varan Vietnam Adventure / Varan Vietnam Productions

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In 2012, a handful of participants created their own production company, soon followed by their own training programme, Varan Vietnam, in 2016. Several films were born out of this experience and enjoyed screenings in numerous festivals, including HÀ LỆ Diễm’s Children of the Mist, which took home the Clarens Prize for Humanist Documentary Filmmaking during the 2022 edition of Cinéma du Réel.

POMELO

Christophe Cognet
Swann Dubus

Varan Vietnam Adventure / Round tables