Tomorrow, Friday, March 18 sees the opening of Paris’ Cinéma du Reél. Running through Sunday, March 27, the event’s 38th edition includes just under 50 new or recent feature-length selections, joining additional retrospective and tribute sections. Highlights from the former are noted below:
The festival’s French Competition offers eleven features vying for consideration, including: Georgi Lazarevski’s ZONA FRANCA, which profiles two men against the backdrop of an isolated Patagonian shopping mall; Vincent Gaullier and Raphaël Girardot’s SLAUGHTERED (pictured), an inside look at a slaughterhouse and its workers; Catalina Villar’s THE NEW MEDELLÍN, in which the filmmaker revisits subjects from two decades prior in a changed city; Nicolas Hans Martin’s ROMEO AND KRISTINA, about a struggling Roma couple in Marseille; and Judith Abitbol’s VIVERE, which follows a daughter’s relationship with her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s.
The International Competition includes such work as: José Luis Torres Leiva’s THE WINDS KNOW I’M COMING BACK HOME, which uses the casting of a fictional film to reveal the inhabitants of a Chilean island; Ruth Beckermann’s THE DREAMED ONES, a re-imagination of an epistolary romance between two poets; Juan Manuel Sepúlveda’s THE BALLAD OF OPPENHEIMER PARK, a portrait of homeless Natives in Vancouver; Trinh T Minh-ha’s FORGETTING VIETNAM, a meditation on war, country, and memory; and Andres Duque’s OLEG AND THE RARE ARTS (pictured), a portrait of an eccentric octogenarian Russian composer.
The final competitive section, for international first films, includes: Paola Salerno’s THE WEDDING, a personal exploration of the filmmaker’s brother’s wedding a decade ago; Chaghig Arzoumanian’s GEOGRAPHIES, the filmmaker’s expansive Armenian family history; Yi Cui’s OF SHADOWS, about an itinerant Chinese shadow theatre troupe; Emmanuel Grimaud’s GANESH YOURSELF (pictured), which documents reactions to an interactive installation taking on the persona of a Hindu god; and Maxence Voiseux’s THE HEIRS, wherein French farmers worry about the next generation’s embrace of farming.
Finally, among several more familiar titles in the Special Screenings section are: Marta Minorowicz’s hybrid ZUD, weaving the story of a Mongolian herder and his horse-training son; Fabrizio Ferraro’s SEBASTIANO (pictured), an exploration of Rome through paintings of St Sebastian and tourist excursions; Philippe Costantini’s HOUSE OF MOTHERS, which follows a community of teenage mothers in Lisbon; Luis Ospina’s IT ALL STARTED AT THE END, a personal reflection on a 1970s Colombian art collective; and Zhu Rikun’s WELCOME, which reveals Chinese state censorship while the filmmaker is attempting to investigate workers’ health conditions.
what (not) to doc 