Modern Heroes Tread the World Stage From Srebrenica to Tbilisi, India, Palermo and a Wondrous Greenland Ice Sheet in Latest Swiss Docs
17.04.2024 - 13:13
/ variety.com
Swiss Films Previews, the only spread of national movies at Switzerland’s Visions du Réel, the country’s leading doc festival. Presented via excerpts at a two-hour showcase on Wednesday, three further titles – “Kalari – the Martial Art of Female Power,” “The Boy from the River Drina” and “Spheres” – underscored the strength in depth of documentary filmmaking in Switzerland and at least in this year’s Previews, a leitmotif.
In an era of adverse circumstance, the doc features highlight figures who rebel, whether against Russia’s war on the Ukraine (“Dom”), climate change (“Iceman”), homophobia in Palermo, gender violence (“Kalari”), the Srebrenica massacre (“Boy”) or, in the case of Daniel Zimmermann, director of “Spheres,” stock narrative. The doc features’ protagonists rebel, moreover, with courage, good humor, imagination, and above all resilience.
“Quir,” for example, captures footage of gay couple Massimo Milani and Gino Campanella years ago celebrating symbolically the first gay marriage in Italy. Decades later, they are still pushing back against homophobia in a highly conservative Palermo.
That resilience can even take on a Quixotic edge. In “The Boy from the River Drina,” for example, Irvin returns to the woods around Srebrenica, where much of his family were slaughtered, intent on building a village of simple cabins for survivors to return to their homeland.
“Irvin somehow shows us the power of utopia: What sense does it make to build a tourist village with one’s own hands in the place where a genocide took place thirty years earlier?” asks director Zijad Ibrahimovic. “I find it fascinating that a young man, while still searching for the remains of his father, would allow himself the luxury of escaping suffering
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