Strong Characters Dominate Swiss Documentary Projects at Visions du Réel

Wilson Chapman editorMike Hagerty, the prolific character actor who recently starred in HBO’s critically acclaimed dramedy “Somebody Somewhere,” died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 67.Bridget Everett, who played Hagerty’s on-screen daughter in “Somebody Somewhere,” shared the news via her Instagram on Friday.  A post shared by Bridget Everett (@bridgeteverett)A veteran character actor with over 100 credits in various television shows and movies, Hagerty was also known for his recurring role in the hit NBC sitcom “Friends,” where he played Mr.

Tel Aviv’s CoPro 24 — The Israeli Coproduction Market will welcome back the international doc community for the first time in two years later this month. The event, which has over the years unveiled award-winning features such as The Gatekeepers and Advocate, has also unveiled an initial slate of 12 projects.

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Lise Pedersen “Like an Island” (“L’îlot”), a hybrid documentary fable tinged with magical realism by Swiss director Tizian Büchi, has won the Grand Jury Prize at international documentary film festival Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland. The debut feature had its world premiere at the festival, bearing testimony to the event’s reputation as a launchpad for new talent and its tradition for hybrid fiction-reality films.

Lise Pedersen Germany’s Deckert Distribution has picked up international rights for Taiwanese filmmaker Elvis A-Liang Lu’s sophomore feature “A Holy Family,” which world premiered in Visions du Réel’s international competition section.The film is a home-coming story about the director who returns to his village in Taiwan after a 24-year absence. His elder brother is a psychic who offers career advice to the villagers, but fails in his own entrepreneurial ventures as a farmer, and his father is a gambling addict in poor health.

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The 75th Cannes Film Festival, which runs May 17-28, was already due to be a starry affair with the likes of Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick and Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis screening out of competition. Today it got even hotter with a strong Official Selection that should make for glamorous red carpets, but one that will likewise treat serious subject matter.

Lise Pedersen Top industry awards at the 53rd edition of the international documentary film festival Visions du Réel have gone to “La Bonga,” “Anatomy of the Night,” “The Other Profile,” “Noor” and “Becoming Roosi.” A total of 27 projects were invited to participate in three key forums – VdR-Pitching, VdR-Work in Progress and VdR-Rough Cut Lab – that ran as part of the festival’s industry activities in Nyon from April 10-14.Seventeen awards were handed out to 16 docs-in-the-making, two of which won a double award: “La Bonga,” by Sebastián Pinzón Silva and Canela Reyes, took the Visions Sud Est and Raggioverde Subtitling trophies, and “Mailin” by Maria Silvia Esteve won both the TËNK Post-Production and Party Film Sales awards. Considered to be the festival’s top industry prize, the Vision Sud Est award comes with a 10,000 CHF ($10,700) cash prize handed out to the best project from the Southern or Eastern Europe, and is the only award that takes in titles in both of the festival’s main industry sections: the VdR-Pitching and the VdR-Work in Progress segment.Handing out the prize, jury member Delphine Jeanneret, programmer and curator at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterhur in Switzerland, said: “We decided to award a highly promising collective work that will have a broad impact on a community that took an active part in a portrait empowering them to reclaim their community through filmmaking.”Pinzón Silva and Reyes’ debut feature, “La Bonga” is about a displaced Afro-Colombian community that embarks on a symbolic journey through the jungles of the Caribbean to resurrect a home that exists only in their memories.

Lise Pedersen “Il Posto” (“A Steady Job”), which world premiered Tuesday at Visions du Réel film festival, is set to launch in Europe on Franco-German channel ARTE and German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk in September. The film is directed by Italian duo Mattia Colombo and Gianluca Matarrese, whose “Fashion Babylon” premiered recently at CPH:DOX.

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Lise Pedersen The French duo behind “The Last Hillbilly,” which received a Special Mention in the First Appearance category at IDFA, have been pitching their new project at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel. “A Dog’s Life” will follow the journey of six teenage girls from the juvenile detention center in Bakersfield as they embark on a rehabilitation program: for three months, the girls will attempt to mend their own lives by taking care of a rescued dog. Diane Sara Bouzgarrou told Variety how she and partner Thomas Jenkoe were inspired to pick up where they had left off with their first feature collaboration.

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Lise Pedersen Swiss sales agent Lightdox has added competition titles “Kapr Code” by Lucie Králová and “Garçonnières” by Céline Pernet to its lineup at international doc festival Visions du Réel, which runs April 7-17 in Nyon, Switzerland.Competing in the Burning Lights category, “Kapr Code” is described as a “documentary opera” that traces the life of controversial avant-garde Czech composer Jan Kapr (1914-1988), a Stalin Award laureate who was later banned in communist Czechoslovakia and erased from public memory. Director Lucie Králová transfers the composer’s life into musical composition, playfully mixing modern opera songs with Kapr’s never-before-seen private archive, revealing his humor, inner struggles and desire to be remembered.