At this year’s Visions du Reel, we look at the latest innovations in the field of hybrid documentary in the Burning Lights sidebar: from docu-dramas and re-enactments to fiction that become reality.

This is the fourth edition of the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival – or Visions du Reel – that I have “attended” since the beginning of the pandemic. The reason why I’m using quotation marks is that I didn’t actually visit the small town in western Switzerland, but rather, one of the continent’s most important non-fiction summits, but rather, once again, I had the occasion to enjoy the selection on their online platform, from the comfort of my home.

And every edition in the last three years left behind at least one film that has stayed with me until today, at least one film that has shifted a little bit of my perspective on what documentary cinema may be: in 2020, it was  Unusual Summer; in 2021, it was Esquirlas and Only the Winds; and last year, it eas Herbaria and Olho Animal. The reason why I wanted to begin the article on this note is that I’m very grateful to have this opportunity again: I couldn’t help but notice, over the past year, how the entire online festival infrastructure – which truly saved the industry from drowning in 2020 and 2021 – has been all but completely abandoned by the vast majority of festivals that implemented it. And the fact that Visions du Reel – a real trailblazer in this regard, being one of the first in the world to move its edition online in the spring of 2020 – continues to make its selection available to critics worldwide is more than a noble gesture of accessibility.

But let’s go to the actual films – as always, I kept a close eye on the Burning Lights competitive section, which is dedicated to up-and-coming filmmakers, and is a hotbed of experimental approaches to unusual, rarely-discussed subjects, as well as the short and medium-length film competitions. This time, more than ever, I noticed that the festival included many hybrid films in its selection. Beyond considering the festival’s artistic guidelines and curatorial thinking, it is indeed notable that there is an increasing number of films that are breaking away from the dichotomous approach of fiction and non-fiction – not just in terms of essay-films (like James Wilkins’ Still Film, a minimalist interrogatory of the director’s cinephilia) or found footage films (Maxime Martinot’s The Film You Are About to See, which collects opening disclaimers from throughout the history of cinema), which are both genres that have enjoyed an enormous resurgence in recent years; there are also samples of also strategies that had fallen into certain disuse in the documentary field: such reenactments, non-linear storytelling and even docu-drama techniques.

For example, Catarina Mourão’s Astrakan 79: a portrait based on a series of postcards and diaries of Martim, a teenager in post-revolutionary Portugal, who makes the (rather rash) decision to decide to study in the USSR during the eighties. The filmmaker uses both archival material and “discrete” reenactments (where we see an actor performing Marim as he’s walking in the park with his photo camera, lying bored in his dorm room…) to re-enact this adventure, then jumping back to the present, framing the first part of the film as a story that the protagonist is telling to his child. This isn’t a film that says anything new to an Eastern spectator – an idealistic, young Western communist comes face to face with the on-the-ground reality of the regime, with its array of probing and suspicious stares, bans, methods of control and so on and so forth – but it’s an interesting sample of cinema, if only in terms of its formality.

We find another reenactment in Basil Da Cunha’s virtuoso 2720 – we follow two protagonists (a young girl looking for her brother and a young ex-con who is starting his first job after being released) in parallel, alternating long single shots that follow them as they’re walking through Lisbon’s Reboleira neighborhood, where the calm of a sunny afternoon in the community is threatened by the specter of an incoming police raid: simultaneously an exhaustive exploration of life in a ghettoized community and of the systemic violence that said communities are subjected to. (The subject of police brutality also appears in Incident, directed by the great Bill Morrison, which uses surveillance and bodycam footage to reenact the senseless, cold-blooded murder of a black hairdresser by an inexperienced cop.)

In other cases, one discovers clashes between fictional realms and real territories: not so much in Samuel Moreno Alvarez’s Filming, a making-of documentary that is juxtaposed with quotes from Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer in an ironic fashion (one of the section’s weaker films), but especially in Geoffrey Lachassagne’s Apocryphal Country, which traces the real bounds of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, seeking its equivalent in the contemporary United States – and trying to capture something of the spirit of his characters in the people it meets along the way. At other times, reality becomes the basis for fiction: in And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil, Iranian filmmaker Saleh Kashefi uses sound to imagine – starting from material found in the online audiovisual archive of Imam Khamenei – the final moments of the regime in Tehran, which about to be overthrown by a fictional revolution.

Last but not least, one discovers reals where different planes of reality coexist – like in An Inhabited Volcano, which captures the violent awakening of the Cumbe Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands, its structure guided by WhatsApp voice messages that a handful of friends sent to each other during the eruption. Long, almost hypnotic long single shots of the volcano are set against messages in which the panic and confusion of the island’s inhabitants are palpable, and as the eruption stretches over days and weeks, we witness in real-time how locals adjust to a frightening new normality – and the fate of a home belonging to one of character, which lies perilously close to the mountain’s slope, constitutes the film’s main point of tension.

But, for me, the most pleasant surprise of the festival was Knit’s Island, co-directed by Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse & Quentin L’helgoualc’h – an ambitious documentary about online gamer communities that was “shot” entirely within an MMORPG. After all, cinema (be it fictional or documentary) has shown an increasing attraction to the video game medium over the past three decades – I’m thinking, for example, of early representations in narrative films such as Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God, or Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover, but especially Harun Farocki’s Serious Games (2009-2010) tetraptych. And in the last couple of years, the number of films – especially shorts – that have tackled themes such as gamification, virtual reality, the construction/architecture of digital universes, and their governing rules, has steadily increased. Just to name a few – My Own Landscapes (2020), Back to 2069 (2020), Tracing Utopia (2021) and Hardly Working (2022).

However, I’ll go so far as to say that Knit’s Island is something else entirely. It’s not just because of its scope and duration, but especially because it is a film that applies a cinematic logic and perspective to the virtual environment, not allowing itself to be seduced by the game’s representational mechanics and thus adopting a somewhat passive stance, but applying an active gaze to it, looking for frames and counter-frames, cropping static shots, close-ups or panning the landscape, using the eyes of the virtual avatars to act as cameras. Moreover, the film avoids the (now) common places of this sub-genre – the analysis of violence and the military nature of many games, the alienation and loneliness of gamers – but instead seeks to show how they function as tight-knit communities.

And this success is the result of the three co-directors’ approach, of the way they conceptualized their entry into the universe of DayZ, a spinoff of the Arma series, a survival game set in a zombie apocalypse – namely as if they were assembling a real-life field film crew: Barbier as director, L’helgoualc’h as lead “cameraman” and Causse as a second camera operator and stage manager. (Incidentally, this is the trio’s second film set in the video game universe: their 2017 short, Marlowe Drive, was set in the GTA universe.) Switching between first-person (thus emulating the posture of an immanent camera) and third-person (for tracking shots) perspectives, the latter co-directors often complement each other in the interviews Barbier conducts with various players, working together on the decoupage and countershots.

If at first, their general approach is similar to that of a war-zone documentary (interviews with various factions of gamers – some violent and anarchic, others peaceful, driven by various ethical codes), little by little, an incredible switch occurs: some players begin to open up about their “real”, day-to-day lives, letting go of the parallel identities they built for themselves in DayZ, and together with them, the stereotypical idea that gamers are all losers & freaks, or that all they do there is shoot and chop up zombies. From visual artists and advertisers to young mothers, they all share the common goal of seeking community and a way to disconnect – until their life in DayZ becomes something of a second skin: we see virtual parties, pseudo-church services, journeys to the edge of the virtual world, or attempts to puncture its boundaries through the purposeful use glitches, with absolutely spectacular results, a reminder that this world remains fundamentally suspended between fiction and reality.

To arrive at a conclusion of sorts – I wonder if all of these films, considering their difference in strategy, aren’t a sort of artistic response to a moment in time and culture where simple, straightforward answers to any questions are no longer possible; a time where the act of discovering what one may call “the truth” relies more than ever on deploying a strategy that is not exclusive to one single genre or perspective (I personally I reject the idea of a “post-truth” society while conceding that there are some elements of it that hold their ground), especially in what concerns visual approaches? In the end, only a very skillful curatorial work can give rise to these kinds of questions – and for the fourth year in a row, Visions du Reel deserves all the praise.

Main image: Knit’s Island.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.