Bold Risks in Storytelling
The Visions du Réel festival is one of the best addresses for documentary filmmaking. Of particular interest is the Burning Lights section, in which formally courageous and adventurous films can be discovered.
Anyone travelling to the Visions du Réel festival in the small town of Nyon on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva doesn’t have to worry about running the risk of being bored in a screening. The festival stands for high quality in its selection of films. In the past, it has repeatedly brought new names to the international stage. In 2025, around a third of the films in the main competition and in the second most important Burning Lights section were feature film debuts. These first films in the two international sections were eligible for the FIPRESCI Award.
The films in the Burning Lights section, in which formally new and adventurous films celebrate their world premiere, are particularly fascinating. This year, for example, there was the highly subjective essay film by Pascal Hamand: Je n’embrasse pas les images. Based on his experience of his father’s death while he was still a small child, the director traces the connection between the image and the essence of things in his life and boldly dislocates images and associated sounds. In The World Upside Down by Agostina Di Luciano and Leon Schwitter, moments of minor inadequacies and failure in the everyday life of a family in rural Argentina combine to form a poetic tribute to life. The film is a spectacularly unspectacular sequence of events, which the two directors wind up beautifully in the closing credits with a highly moving song. And To the West, in Zapata by David Bim captivates with the extraordinary expressiveness of its black and white images and the surrounding sounds. The film is a seemingly mythical portrait of a couple who devotedly care for their sick son in the midst of the pristine wilderness of a swampy landscape, wresting love and tenderness from the harshness of the daily struggle for survival. In its formal beauty and intensity, the film becomes a timeless depiction of humanity. The film was honoured with the FIPRESCI Prize and also won the second most important prize in the Burning Lights section with the Special Award of the Jury.
Electronic devices and the gentleness of snow
The bold formal decisions in Say Goodbye by Paloma López Carrillo also attracted attention. The Mexican director has made a name for herself in her long career as an award winning editor. In her first feature-length documentary film produced by her sister, she tells a story of their own family. It’s a subtly political film focussing on the pain and loneliness that the loss of a father and the uncertainty about his fate leaves behind for the remaining members of the family. The father was arrested by the border authorities in 2015, a year later there is no certainty as to whether or not he is still alive and he is considered to have «disappeared». However, the audience only finds this out about halfway through the film, just as it only becomes clear late on how the characters belong together: the mother Rosa, the daughter Sol and the brother Javier.
Paloma López Carrillo’s narrative style recreates a feeling of loneliness and forlornness in the audience. Say Goodbye is filmed almost exclusively in long, slow static shots, making the viewer an observer sharing the intimacy of the members of the family. The characters frequently appear in a somehow trapped and disconnected situations highlighting their sorrow and emotional isolation: In the first shot, Rosa, the mother is seen inside her car at a car wash, where she receives electronic instructions from outside. Sol, the daughter, is filmed in her flat with her back to the camera. She also receives instructions from everyday electronic devices and furthermore speaks to a psychologist via Zoom, these sessions will later drive the story forward. Javier, the son, is seen playing a game on a TV-screen.
The film works with alternating views of interiors and landscapes, with rear views of people and views from the front, with intimacy and surface – taken to the extreme in a performance in which Sol presents herself as a radiant bodybuilder. In the final scene, the family takes a trip together to a winter sports area in remembrance of an earlier outing at a time, the father was still with them and the film ends with a sleigh ride in the snow-covered forest. An image that is everything at once: memory, a white sheet that covers the past and also the present confusion in which the remaining family are coming together.
Say Goodbye is a superficially inconspicuous film of utmost intimacy, which captivates with its courage for taking formal risks. Like many other films at the Visions du Réel festival, it blurs the boundaries between documentary observation and creatively arranged storytelling close to fiction in order to tell the story that needs to be told.
Anne-Sophie Scholl
©FIPRESCI 2025