Due to its Italian setting, comparisons are perhaps inevitable not only with the aforementioned Taviani film, but also with Mario Martone’s Fuori, released in 2025 and based on Goliarda Sapienza’s autobiographical novel L’Università di Rebibbia, about the time she spent inside a famous prison in Rome and what happened to her fellow inmates after they were released. The contrast between the two titles, Fuori (outside) and Dentro (inside), is amusing but coincidental, as Amiel began developing her project shortly after the premiere of her fiction debut Pearl (2018), upon coming across the work of Armando Punzo.

An acclaimed stage director, Punzo has spent the last few decades inside a prison, located in Volterra, Tuscany. He’s there by choice, driven by artistic hunger to create work with the inmates, all of whom are serving long sentences. Within the confines of the penitentiary and its walls, he pushes the convicted men to express themselves in as free a manner as possible, turning their life behind bars into an unexpected vessel for liberty, at least on a creative level. There are occasional treks to other locations (such as when Punzo receives a lifetime achievement award from the Venice Biennale in 2023), but for the most part, the work done by the Compagnia della Fortezza (the Company of the Fortress) is situated in that building which sets the men free while keeping them locked up.

Whereas Caesar Must Die dramatized the process leading to a single performance, Dentro is more about the creative flow in general, the relationship between the director, the cast and the texts, as seen through the prism of a logistical context that gives a new meaning to the Bard’s famous line “All the world’s a stage”. Or perhaps in this case it should be worlds, plural, as the only form of escape these men – far more than “merely players” – have at their disposal, and the means to achieve limited interaction with other locales. And this applies not only to the convicts, but to Punzo himself who, in the film’s most poignant piece of voiceover, explains he’s not trying to “save” anyone: “I’m actually the problem. I’m the one with unresolved issues with reality, with the world. I need to work with people to explore these questions further.”

Such a perspective on theater and the importance of a communal creative experience is probably part of why Elsa Amiel, herself the child of a stage performer (the celebrated Swiss mime Jean-Pierre Amiel, who notably collaborated with Jim Henson) and already interested in how bodies are depicted on the screen, was drawn to this closed space that imagination can open up, this time with a little help from cinematic vision. As such, the title refers not only to the literal condition of the inmates, but also – and maybe more so – to the endless ideas and energy they have within and cannot wait to unleash.

Director, screenwriter: Elsa Amiel
Producers: Eugénie Michel-Villette, Lionel Baier, Agnieszka Ramu
Cinematography: Paulina Pisarek, Elsa Amiel
Music: Fred Avril
Sound: Antoine-Basile Mercier, Marc Thill, Xavier Lavorel, Rémi Chanaud, Louis-Julien Pannetier, Théo Viroton
Production companies: Les Films du Bilboquet, Bande à part Films, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse
World sales: Bande à part Films
Venue: Visions du Réel (International Feature Film Competition)
In Italian
95 minutes

The film was shot in Cantal, a rural department in France’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region which is not too far from Lucien Roux’s hometown of La Tronche, in the Isère department. This is where the farmer Didier leads a fairly isolated existence, especially after the passing of his brother Claude. Prone to loneliness, Didier throws himself into his work, looking out for the cows that have always defined his existence. The daily routine is not without difficulties, and not just because of the physical aspects of the job: Didier was born deaf and, without Claude by his side, he has to reinvent himself linguistically, finding new ways to get around his aural impairment and make himself understood, all while the national farming business is grappling with hardships periodically recounted through news broadcasts.

In addition to writing and directing, Joulaud and Roux also served as cinematographers, capturing the not-always-ordinary quotidian habits of Didier’s existence. Given the premise, they place an expected but nonetheless welcome focus on the visual component, highlighting how the farmer goes on about his life almost wordlessly, save for when he has to communicate with other people. From the very beginning, the opening shots make clear this is a milieu that, while rooted in the realities of the region, exists as its own little world, particularly as far as Didier and his personal perception of his surroundings are concerned.

In that sense, the international title sort of smudges the nuance contained in the original French: the voice of the herd, rather than the echo. It’s a voice expressed without dialogue, one that Didier has grown accustomed to over the many years spent with the cows. Through that relationship between farmer and cattle, the film plays as an ideal companion piece, and spiritual successor, to Ramboy. There, it was a question of learning, as a young boy got initiated into family traditions in Ireland; here, we deal with a man who has already learned, and honed his skills to such a degree he can, hopefully, carry out his duties and coexist with a community that, for all intents and purposes, will never be able to fully understand him.

The same goes for the two filmmakers: if the 2022 short was a calling card, this feature-length expansion on similar themes is a confident work of artistic and humanistic maturity, one that finds the universal hook of solidarity and man’s profound bond with nature in a very specific rural microcosm that, much like its deaf inhabitant, finds a way to exist on its own terms.

Directors, Screenwriters: Matthias Joulaud, Lucien Roux
Producers: Juliana Fanjul, Annick Bouissou, Alexandre Cornu
Cinematography: Matthias Joulaud, Lucien Roux
Music: Sylvie Klijn, Yatoni Roy Cantu
Sound: Yatoni Roy Cantu
Production companies: Akka Films, Les films du tambour de soie, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse
World sales: Akka Films
Venue: Visions du Réel (Burning Lights Competition)
In French
80 minutes

Such forms of entertainment are a necessity after viewing 3,240 submissions from which a program of 128 films (not including retrospectives) has been assembled, on a somewhat tight schedule. Bujès explains: “In a festival landscape which is very competitive, we need to work on the selection as late as possible, in order to consider all the most recent films we can receive.”

The festival’s concern with topicality also means quite a few entries can be emotionally overwhelming, with ties to subjects such as the pandemic, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine (a country with a remarkable roster of titles in the program this year) and the recent escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It was fitting that No Other Land, which had already made waves in Berlin and was codirected by four directors belonging to a mixed Palestinian and Israeli film collective, ended up winning the Audience Award.

Of the 128 new releases in the lineup, 88 are world premieres and 14 international premieres. They are, for the most part, to be found in the various competitive sections: International Feature Film Competition (won this year by The Landscape and the Fury by Swiss filmmaker Nicole Vögele), Burning Lights (feature films that are particularly bold in terms of cinematic language), National Competition (Swiss productions and co-productions), and the International Medium Length and Short Film Competition. The last, according to Bujès, is the main provider of levity outside of the festival’s John Wilson retrospective.

On the non-competitive side, the main showcase is Grand Angle, where feature length documentaries with wide appeal compete for the Audience Award. Highlights and Special Screenings also offer viewers the chance to see high-profile titles, primarily as European or Swiss premieres. The 2024 lineup includes Cannes veterans such as Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts and Steve McQueen’s Occupied City. Opening Scenes, devoted to student work and first shorts, is the ideal platform for young filmmakers.

The Doc Alliance Selection sidebar reflects the festival’s status as one of eight members of the European organization devoted to documentary filmmaking (the other seven are CPH: DOX from Denmark, Doclisboa from Portugal, DOK Leipzig from Germany, Millennium Docs Against Gravity from Poland, Docudays UA from Ukraine, FID Marseille from France and Jihlava IDFF from the Czech Republic). It’s yet another badge of honor for one of Switzerland’s longest running festivals, which takes place in Nyon every April and has recently expanded its reach with select screenings also happening in the neighboring municipality of Gland.

First established in 1969, the event – then known as the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival – was founded by Moritz de Hadeln, who went on to serve as the artistic director of Locarno, Berlin and Venice. It was initially conceived as a showcase for Swiss productions, given the country’s prolific documentary output, as well as titles originating on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and thus very hard to see in the West.

Visions du Réel, the festival’s current moniker, first appeared in 1995 under the stewardship of Jean Perret, and it highlights an element Bujès is also keen on emphasizing when it comes to the program: the artistic vision. “It is all about the filmmaking,” she notes. “The subject does matter to some extent, of course, but not as much as the filmmaker actually having a vision and executing it in an original manner. Documentaries are first and foremost cinema.”

This is perhaps best reflected in the event’s lifetime achievement award, formerly known as Maître du Réel and now as Guest of Honour, which goes to a filmmaker who has redefined reality on screen, through documentaries as well as fiction films. The prize, introduced by Luciano Barisone in 2014, has gone to film luminaries Richard Dindo, Barbet Schroeder, Peter Greenaway, Alain Cavalier, Claire Simon, Werner Herzog, Claire Denis, Emmanuel Carrère, Marco Bellocchio and Lucrecia Martel.

Joining their ranks in 2024 is Jia Zhang-ke, who embarked on his first international trip in over four years to be in Nyon, a month before he will unveil his new film in Cannes. Such is the allure of a festival that welcomes professionals and film enthusiasts from all over the world, who arrive on the shores of Lake Geneva to see the latest in documentary filmmaking trends, partake in the rich VdR-Industry activities, or listen to the likes of Jia, Alice Diop or John Wilson as they talk about the past, present and future of reality captured on camera.

 International Feature Film Competition

Grand Jury Prize offered by la Mobilière
The Landscape and the Fury, Nicole Vögele (Switzerland)

Special Jury Award offered by Région de Nyon
Rising Up at Night, Nelson Makengo (Democratic Republic of Congo, Belgium, Germany, Burkina Faso, Qatar)

Special Mentions
My Memory Is Full of Ghosts, Anas Zawahri (Syria)
We Are Inside, Farah Kassem (Lebanon, Qatar, Denmark)

Burning Lights Competition

Jury Prize in the Burning Lights Competition offered by Canton de Vaud
A Fidai Film, Kamal Aljafari (Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brazil, France)

Special Jury Award offered by la Société des Hôteliers de la Côte
Riders, Martín Rejtman (Argentina, Portugal, Venezuela)

Special Mention
(Revolution, Fulfil Your Promise) Red Love, Dora García (Mexico, Spain, Norway, Belgium)

National Competition

Jury Prize in the National Competition offered by SRG SSR
Brunaupark, Felix Hergert and Dominik Zietlow (Switzerland)

Special Jury Award in the National Competition for a feature film directed by a filmmaker of Swiss nationality or resident in Switzerland offered by SSA/Suissimage
Valentina and the MUOSters, Francesca Scalisi (Switzerland, Italy)

Special Mentions
An Ordinary Life, Alexander Kuznetsov (France, Switzerland, USA)
Sauve qui peut, Alexe Poukine (Belgium, Switzerland, France)

Audience Award offered by the city of Nyon
No Other Land, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor (Israel, Paletine)

International Medium Length and Short Film Competition

Jury Prize for the best Medium Length Film offered by Clinique de Genolier
Campus Monde, N’tifafa Y.E. Glikou (Senegal, Benin, France)

Jury Prize for the best Short Film offered by la Fondation Goblet
Memories of an Unborn Sun, Marcel Mrejen (Algeria, France, Netherlands)

Youth Jury Prize

Special Youth Jury Award for a Medium Length Film offered by École Moser
Koka, Aliaksandr Tsymbaliuk (Poland)

Special Youth Jury Award for the best Short Film offered by Mémoire Vive
A Move, Elahe Esmaili (Iran, UK)

Interreligious Award
Prize for a feature film of the International Competition that sheds light on issues dealing with the meaning of life
Kamay, Ilyas Yourish and Shahrokh Bikaran (Afghanistan, Belgium, Germany, France)

Zonta Award
Prize for a female filmmaker whose work reveals mastery and talent and calls for support for future creations.
Les Miennes, Samira El Mouzghibati (Belgium, France)

International Critics’ Award – FIPRESCI Award
Prize for a first feature film presented in the International Feature Film Competition or the Burning Lights Competition.
Les Miennes, Samira El Mouzghibati (Belgium, France)

Perception Change Award
Prize awarded to a film that sheds light on the current issues that will define the world of tomorrow. Offered by the Director General of the Geneva UN with the support of the Diplomatic Club
Save Our Souls, Jean-Baptiste Bonnet (France)

Prix RTS de soutien à la création documentaire
Prize aiming at promoting creative documentary filmmaking in French-speaking Switzerland
Après nous le feu, Chamsi Diba (Suisse)

Vera entered Saint Elisabeth Convent, a Russian Orthodox convent on the outskirts of Minsk in Belarus, at the age of twenty. She was addicted to heroin, and reluctantly committed to waiting there for a year for her partner Oleg to be released from prison. After he blindsided her with the devastating news he had met another woman, she decided not to give up her new monastic ways — and only much later has come to reconsider this path.

Vera is given time in this quiet, contemplative portrait to tell her own story in sparse reflections. Frame after frame come black-and-white images of arresting aesthetic beauty, painting the convent and its surroundings in an aura that is almost magical and otherworldly. Sequences of Vera, draped in a long black habit on the back of a white horse cantering through deep snowy expanses of woodland, are fairytale-like and seem almost out of time. But this stunning, stylised quality is deeply ambivalent, as it emerges that the calmly ordered world of the convent is limiting, in terms of the emotional repression and detachment it enables.

Vera recalls having been desperate to stop feeling, because it was too painful, and to dissolve into her environment. Aching for a substitute to heroin, which initially got her hooked through the seductive illusion of access to a mysterious, higher world and sense of peace before it revealed its ravaging “real face,” she grasped onto the rituals of the convent as another arcane obsession to lose herself in. Amid chanting, bells, candles and prayers, it is easy to see how the trappings of Orthodox religion, portrayed in stark light and shadow, might offer a sense of refuge and spiritual repose.

Guilt and a kind of punitive asceticism also come through as motivations for Vera, as she reflects in snatches on the damage toll of her old life, from HIV diagnoses to robbing relatives and pushing drugs. Her dominant presence and intensity is compelling to watch; she recognises the influence she has had over others, and has become afraid of it. The monastic life is a shield from romantic love more than it is a conduit for spirituality for this member of the order, and while she tells a superior she is there to search for freedom, she admits she is yet to define it. And she is not the only one: Saint Elisabeth and its farm also welcome men who are in rehabilitation, with hooliganism, clandestine chemistry and the like on their rap sheets, and similar stories to Vera’s around crime and substance dependence. Hiding away from the ugliness and chaos of the outside world, they live from “liturgy to liturgy,” reticent to return, and refer to their new routines as a different form of addiction.

After Vera reaches the point of burning her habit and venturing back out into the wider world, black and white shifts to colour, a signal of renewed fullness that may not be subtle, but makes sense within the documentary’s very sensory approach to the experienced environment. Haras du Paty, a horse stable and farm in the Camargue region of France, is a new sanctuary for Vera, her dressage lessons and river-swimming coming to us in close-up, sun-kissed fragments, accompanied by birdsong. Integrating the body and its movements into nature’s rhythms takes practice, and it is as if she is learning to feel again from square one. For Vera, the material world is a sublime but ambiguous gift, offering pleasure or problems requiring extreme solutions.

Directors, cinematography: Cécile Embleton, Alys Tomlinson
Producer: Laura Shacham
Editing: Romain Beck, Cécile Embleton
Sound: Leonardo Cauteruccio
Production company, Sales: She Makes Productions (UK)
Festival: Visions du Reel (International Feature Film Competition)
In Belarusian, French, English
91 minutes

The illegal pushback on migrants trying to cross the Bosnia-Croatia border into the European Union is portrayed, as adults and children attempting to make it across on the Balkan route are forcibly and repeatedly returned. These travellers, vulnerable but driven with the determination of those with few other options, have scant co-ordinates by which to orient themselves in this unfamiliar place, beyond what remote guidance they can glean from contacts via Facebook Messenger. But it is as if the earth remembers them, or at least, bears witness in some way to the struggles that play out upon it. Across the seasons (divided by title-breaks) and variations of weather, between summer heat, looming storm clouds and torrential rainfall, the landscape is captured in stunning wide shots that suggest its immutable presence across time, as the violence and tragedy of human drama comes and goes. Unhurried and contemplative, the film has patience for detail and a broad scope for the cycles of history. This is the same land that saw the Bosnian War of the 1990s, when regional conflict and ethnic cleansing brought suffering, death and displacement — a memory still raw in the minds of locals, and imprinted deep into the terrain.

The Landscape and the Fury is Swiss documentarian Nicole Vögele’s second feature-length documentary, after her debut Closing Time (2018), a sensory meditation on everyday moments in Taipei, which was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. The most uneasy scenes of Landscape take place at night, as under inky cover of darkness, the migrants try to cross again, with just a cry here or panicked rustle there to alert us to their activities, while an unobtrusive but quietly ominous and beautifully atmospheric soundtrack by Alva Noto raises the tension. In the sunlight of day, they gather what banknotes they have to buy provisions from the local store. Local Bosnian families we encounter along with them are sympathetic, their memories triggered by these refugees from Afghanistan, Syria and other nations in crisis, of war times when they were also moving around, sleeping outdoors, and never knowing whether they were safe. Numerous migrant recountings of violent mistreatment at the hands of the Croatian police, known to confiscate or rip up money, break phones and beat migrants during the illegal deportations, prod the scars of discrimination and ethnic hatred that haunt the population. Children on the route play the game “migrant and police” together in their downtime, to their parents’ consternation; an unmistakable sign their experiences will linger, and take time to process.

The farmland and forest retain traces of those who have passed through, the camera honing in on debris such as dropped passport photos, a shoe sole and a Nokia phone. These are just the more recent indications of strife. White gravestones jut up from the hill, marking the resting place of the dead; a red sign with a skull warns of the many land mines that remain to be cleared since the ‘90s; a rusted guard tower stands as a ghostly relic of militarised danger. There are also items of compassion and hope: the inflatable swimming pool that one family is gifted by Samir, a local who assists them as they camp out in an empty schoolroom, offers brief restful respite, and a treasured memory, recalled later in a Facetime chat. Small moments of empathy such as these infuse deep care into a film that might otherwise have seemed overly conceptual. Instead, emotions, objects and the earth enter into a kind of dialogue, in a reflection on the interconnected and eternally repeating state of humans between belonging and being lost.

Director, screenwriter: Nicole Vögele
Producers: Adrian Blaser, Aline Schmid
Director of photography: Stefan Sick
Editing: Hannes Bruun
Music: Alva Noto
Sound design: Jean-Pierre Gerth, Jonathan Schorr
Production company, sales: Beauvoir Films (Switzerland)
In Bosnian, Farsi, Dari, Kurdish
Venue: Visions du Reel (International Feature Film Competition)
138 minutes

The opening titles of the film, which had its world premiere in the International Feature Film Competition at Visions du Reel in Nyon, recount the story of forty Hazera girls who, surrounded by troops and resisting to the last, chose to jump off a cliff rather than become enslaved — a historical event recounted with devastating echoes in one family’s current-day tragedy. Zahra Khawari, a young student from the remote province who had been writing her thesis at the University of Kabul, has poisoned herself after some kind of hushed-up, traumatic experience with her professor, and a legal case against him to hold him responsible for the suicide has been opened. Her remaining family is followed over six years, as they struggle to come to terms with the loss, clarify the hazy circumstances, and pursue justice. With the Taliban’s rise to power in 2021, comes a renewed cycle in the derailment of women’s lives and aspirations. This stunning, poetic doc captures layers of grief that are both personal and political.

Absence is achingly palpable in nearly every frame, in a film that is quietly observational, contemplative and full of solitude. It’s an atmosphere at odds with more standard, fact-heavy and analytical documentaries setting out legal cases, but it conveys how remote the province of Daikundi, often cut off by heavy snowfall, is from Kabul, and how little voice or leverage the Khawari family have to make themselves heard within a system that tends to veil its processes and cover up its power abuses. Zahra’s parents, who are tormented by her final cryptic phone call to the family, take the arduous and treacherous journey of several days by road to Kabul to follow her case, but it’s hard to for them to access information, and despite the legal proceedings and campus protests calling for justice, we too gain scant elucidation. Even the retrieval of her personal affects — the books and clothes that are as close to her physical presence as the family can now get in their grief — is long-winded and bureaucratic. Over the course of the film, Taliban take over parts of the route, making the drive even more dangerous.

Zahra’s younger sister Freshta had taken long walks to the dark side of the mountain to gather kamay for her sister, whose original thesis was on livestock nutrition before her professor rejected it and her subsequent topics of research. In breathtaking shots of the landscape we see her small, determined figure framed against the austere sky as she collects the plant from the vast and rugged terrain. Freshta, who still sees Zahra a lot in dreams, addresses her dead sister directly in voiceover in almost a whisper, which at times swells into singing. She is preparing for the school National Entrance Exam, and must decide whether to follow her sister’s academic path, despite her parents’ protective misgivings, and a newly repressive and fearful climate that has seen Islamist terror attacks on educational facilities.

“No matter how the world is flooded, the water can’t reach the mountains,” is an old saying that Zahra’s father is fond of. But the sound of heavy weaponry in the distance signals that, in community as well as personal matters, outside threats cannot be held off forever. As the Taliban advances, panic spreads, and the Khawari family, with other locals, move to evacuate. With these unexpected developments during production, Kamay becomes a farewell for a homeland as well as a sister, and a place to nurture their memories as seeds for the future.

Directors, Writers, Cinematography: Ilyas Yourish, Shahrokh Bikaran
Editing: Joelle Alexis
Sound: Aqela Sharifi, Shahrokh Bikaran
Music: Karim Baggili
Producers: Ilyas Yourish, Hanne Phlypo, Evelien De Graef
Production companies: Kamay Film (Afghanistan), Clin d’oeil films (Belgium), Row Pictures (Germany)
Sales: Cat & Docs
Festival: Visions du Reel (International Feature Film Competition)
In Persian (Hazaragi)
106 minutes

It’s constructed from VHS footage her father shot when touring the West as a figure skater with Ukrainian ensemble Ballet on Ice in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and letters her parents exchanged as they pursued their dreams within the rigid limitations imposed upon them as Soviet culture workers. They aspired to the West’s consumerist lifestyle, while Russia sought to shape Ukraine into its own image, until with independence in 1992 came the shock of transition and a reckoning with economic instability and illusions. Maria’s voiceover holds the grainy impressions of an alien, capitalist world from her father’s tapes together with poetic reflections on the tides of time, and an undertow of the acute sadness that comes with hindsight in a Europe that is again catastrophically divided.

The film’s postscript dedicates the film to Viktor Onysko, originally enlisted as the editor, but killed on the war’s frontline in December 2022 while serving in the Ukrainian army after Russia’s full-scale invasion, leaving behind an eight-year-old daughter. This brings quietly devastating context to a tone at least as bitter as it is sweet. The belief that Ukraine was on an immediate road to Europe with the Soviet Union’s collapse has not arrived at a happy end, it’s all too clear — a hope that remains in the frames stuck in time, while history has again turned and darkened.

Maria’s father purchased his video camera, a rare commodity in Soviet Ukraine, from the director of the troupe he danced for in 1986, the same year that she was born. Maria appears frequently in the frame as a toddler, between the precise theatricality of ice dancing and the tangible markers, in smudgy VHS and retro chart hits, of a lost era. Beyond the domestic scenes recording family moments for posterity, the cityscapes of the USSR are barely shown, despite the skater’s numerous trips across it. He was not interested in filming the familiar contours of a place he experienced as a trap. Rather, he was obsessed with capturing the near-mythical, consumerist universe beyond the communist bloc, where price-tagged luxury was on display, there was a whiff of freedom despite KGB monitoring (“You leave the Soviet Union, cross the border, and start breathing”), and tour members were known to temporarily go missing from the bus to buy sequined sweaters from the mind-boggling array of goods at shopping malls.

Her father admits that the highly coveted opportunity for travel abroad was his motivation for becoming a figure skater, a position that granted him privileges but never pride in representing the USSR. He is propelled through a kaleidoscope of tour stops, performing in Finland, the Emirates, Australia, Greece, Hong Kong and more. Maria’s mother worked behind the scenes at the Ballet on Ice, despite having an architecture degree, and to her great chagrin was blocked from tours beyond other socialist nations.

The Ukrainian ensemble has scores of folk costumes but is considered Russian abroad, and has Russian as its working language — a telling geopolitical snapshot of Moscow’s quashing of the national identity of its declared Soviet republics. Stoianova, who also consulted the ballet’s archives, contrasts the dry, propagandistic and target-based socialist vernacular in official texts about the educational aims and show numbers of the ballet with the rich texture of real moments on the ground.

Against VHS snatches of the family’s life in all its affections, jokes, set-backs and triumphs, the turbulent sweep of wider historical changes is recounted. Entrepreneurship becomes permitted in the Perestroika climate of the late ‘80s, and Maria’s father starts a side hustle in video production. The rise of national independence movements and fall of the Berlin Wall also herald the Soviet Union’s collapse, with news events televised. This access to information is in stark contrast to the official hush around Chernobyl, which in 1986 had forced the family to leave Kyiv. As independence comes, and Ukraine’s shaky transition to capitalism brings sky-high inflation and a new unpredictability around forging material security, they leave their apartment and its disrepair for work at amusement parks in the west, where the free market brings steady pay but a sense of isolation and lack of collective purpose in self-reliance. The kitschy entertainments of Europa-park, a sprawling theme park in Germany, bring new doubts about work and cultural value — a poignant reminder that the line in Europe between dreams and nightmares is thin.

Director: Maria Stoianova
Producers: Karianne Berge, Alina Gorlova, Maksym Nakonechnyi, Carsetn Aanonsen
Cinematography: Mykhailo Stoianov
Editing: Maryna Maykovska
Sound: Vasyl Yavtushenko
Music: Anton Dehtiarov
Production companies: Indie Film (Norway), Tabor (Ukraine)
Sales: Tabor
Festival: Visions du Reel (International Feature Film Competition)
In Ukrainian, Russian, English
95 minutes

Largely dialogue-free, the film (which had its world premiere at Sundance and screens at Visions du Reel in Nyon in the Highlights section) welcomes us inside the homes, household routines, kinks and rituals of disparate members of today’s Church of Satan around the world, placing a high premium on ornate visual trappings and performed spectacle. Founded by American occultist Anton LaVey (a quote from his 1969 The Satanic Bible opens the doc), the religious organisation does not promote belief in an actual Devil, but rather endorses the rational understanding that life is to be lived freely and to the full on Earth according to self-made rules, manifesting one’s own desires and sense of mystery.

The doc’s lean into aesthetic trappings over verbal ideological analysis does not feel superficial, but operates effectively as show-don’t-tell. In episodic vignettes, mundane domestic routine co-exists with costumed extravagance (in one segment, for instance, a man paints his face white with black-rimmed eyes at the kitchen table before hanging out the laundry), inviting us to consider Church practices as a creative means of expression and self-actualisation, that enhances the everyday through drama.

Cummings shoots with some degree of distanced curiosity, though his obvious appreciation for the transgressive spirit of the Church and its unapologetic embrace of the weird and marginalised buoys up every frame. Theatrical tableaux emerge in collaboration with subjects, with the non-judgment that also underpinned his well-received short Buffalo Juggalos (2014), a surreal portrait of the much maligned Juggalo subculture of Buffalo, New York. His open-mindedness, affinity for outsiders and wry delight in the absurdities that colour reality are comparable to the mindset fellow American documentarian Penny Lane brought to her equally vibrant Heil Satan? (2019), a de-stigmatising look into the non-theistic organisation called the Satanic Temple. But the two films are vastly different, as Lane focused on the political activism of a group staging provocative public actions in support of secular democracy. Those with at least a mid-tolerance for deviance from convention will find much that is fresh in Realm of Satan.

In Realm of Satan, a goat gives birth; dancers light flaming antlers in the woods; there are magic tricks with cards and swords; a velvet-gowned woman cradles a goat in an inverted Nativity scene, and in fairly sexually explicit scenes, figures in PVC gimp suits converge for an orgy. Sharp dressers in the ubiquitous red and black palette of the Church opt for hearses or black sports cars to get about otherwise sleepy-looking, leafy neighbourhoods, embodying eccentricity in a Church that offers a sense of belonging for the disabled (one central protagonist, Robert, is a wheelchair user) and numerous queer members. A human and an animal face dissolve into one; a being that is half-man and half-goat clops around a kitchen. Delighting in experimentation and the idea of transmutation (indeed, magicians and filmmakers may have much in common), Cummings allows playful scope for comical illusion within porous hybrid borders.

We take a look around the Halloween House, a Gothic house in the so-called Witchcraft District of Poughkeepsie, New York. Founded by a retired stage prop designer, then owned by gay adult entertainer Matthew Camp, it is full of spooky paraphernalia, candelabra and pentagrams year-round. It served as a meeting hub for Church adherents and local misfits, until in 2021 an arsonist burned it down. The gasoline attack on the kitschy mansion is condemned as a possible hate crime — suggesting that those to be feared in society are not the ones playing dress-up as high priestesses and warlocks.

Director, screenwriter, editor: Scott Cummings
Cast: Peter Gilmore, Blanche Barton and Peggy Nadramia
Producers: Caitlin Mae Burke, Pacho Velez, Molly Gandour
Cinematographer: Gerald Kerkletz
Sound: Manuel Meischner, Manuel Grandpierre
Production company: Asterlight (US)Sales: Visit Films (US)
Venue: Visions du Reel (Highlights)
In English, German, Spanish, Swedish
82 minutes