Opening Scenes Lab x Visions du Réel

A Thousand-Year Stage (2020) features local residents and migrant workers in Xiongan New Area, a region in Hebei, China slated to become a megacity, as they await its transformation. The film moves between Baigou Station and the construction site of “Asia’s largest train station”, Xiongan Station.

Pegah Moemen Attare discovers a letter from her grandmother, sent 20 years ago, which has gone unanswered. These phantom words, written in another era, and this other country, Iran, serve to retrace the souvenirs of a place that no longer exists, through three generations of women. A film by way of an impossible correspondence, a poetic and political journey through the memory of exile.  

Yeon Park orders a time machine on eBay for her father's birthday, seeing it as an opportunity to discover a few truths about her family's past. Yeon responds to her father's private prints through another distribution of the sensible. Fun and intimate, I Bought a Time Machine uses technology like a mediation necessary for communication.  

Jesa is a South Korean tradition honouring family ancestors. A glorious feast is offered to the deceased on the anniversary of the death. In this playful and delightful film the director dialogues with her family over Skype about traditions, gender roles and Korean History. The result is a gentle yet emblematic confrontation that unveils a lot about the contradiction and the transformations that South Korea must face.  

Tristan Honsiger, a cellist, improvised for the first time by trying to decipher a partition by Webern. With his accomplices, this tall guy with azure blue eyes has turned music into a perpe-tual playground, combining technique and inventiveness. Pierre Borel and Léa Lanoë draw a spirited portrait of him on film, with the appearance of an improvised jam session in their sights.  

Three young friends of Moroccan origin travel on a lost island, sing, dance, and take us into the shelter of an uninhabited lighthouse. They discover this unknown land like the explorers in a tale of adventures. Following them around in this strange place, Julieta Juncadella carries us away, like a wave, in the movement of a fantasy film.

Aged around 20, Simon has a brain tumour that is gradually destroying his memory and has condemned him to live in the immediate present. From this painful experience, his sister, Nora Štrbová, a filmmaker, has made an organic short animated documentary, which succeeds with a rare formal relevance to represent the inexorable loss of the being.  

In his animated documentary, Henri Marbacher imagines a way of echoing the account of the migratory journey of Agìr, a young Kurd having transited from Syria to Switzerland. Between the voiceover and the animated material, a dialectic is established that reconstitutes memories as a duty of remembrance.  

“Everyone can accomplish a heroic act in their life” hammers home the instructor. But such a destiny is prepared for in the presidential school of cadets that trains volunteer teenagers to serve in the National Guard created by Putin in 2016. Alex Evstigneev photographs these future heroes, whose extreme fragility on the verge of an iron indoctrination he reveals with sound and images.

Elena is the last one. Following her brother's departure from Ticino, she remains alone with her mother in their large lakeside house. For her, it is not yet time to go but, already, she is imagining with nostalgia what she will foresake, carried away by her desire for discovery. Nikita Merlini captures the traces of what she leaves behind her in her gentle journey into adulthood.  

Facing exorbitant fees for sessions with his therapist, Rodrigo Muñoz finds a great economical use of resources in this self–dramatization which portrays the account of his depression. In confronting the pecuniary dimension of the day-to-day, Rodrigo ironically seizes upon film as a process of emancipation.  

Vismán and Alejandro live alone with their father, a veteran of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. In the intimacy of their house and their day-to-day life, the two brothers participate in filming their portrait by imagining staged scenes that reveal the violence inherited from their national and family history.  

In the north of Azerbaijan, at a lakeside sanctuary: three trees are adorned with fabrics woven by the women residing in the neighbouring village, who would come to ward off their sorrows by making nature their ally. With poignant gentleness, Lala Aliyeva's camera brings back to life this mirror-like place where women, in the past, were released, at least spiritually from their harsh condition.  

Wakis, a lumberjack in the Central African Republic, works with his family collecting wood to process into charcoal. But faced with its increasing scarcity—and to avoid conflicts with his neighbours—he must “hunt” trees further and further away from his production site. Tanguy Djaka Yarissi creates an accurate social chronicle about the insecurity of a traditional trade.  

As a small girl, Adèle Shaykhulova had to leave Russia for France, leaving the rest of her family behind. To make up for this absence, she secretly films their conversations. But when she learns that her cousin Sonia, with whom she grew up, has cancer, film becomes perhaps the only way to bridge an immeasurable distance.