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Visions du Réel will honour many different shades of documentary filmmaking in its 48th edition: South Africa, the ‘Rainbow Nation’ (as per Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), offers a multifaceted, intense and exciting film production. For the seventh consecutive time the Festival will cooperate for the Focus section with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), this time to highlight the creativity and diversity of South African filmmaking, thereby exploring personal, political and social topics. 15 documentaries will be presented to the public during the Festival (21 to 29 April 2017) and the Focus Talk (25 April 2017), a day dedicated to meetings and discussions around South African productions that will allow institutions, producers and filmmakers of this country to meet their international counterparts. During this day, five South African film projects that are still being developed will be presented as part of Visions du Réel’s film market, the Doc Outlook – International Market. The most promising film project will be awarded the Prix visions sud est, with an amount of CHF 10 000. > learn more
«South Africa offers a high quality cinema that cannot be separated from its intense and painful history that has been particularly influenced by the Apartheid Regime, which inevitably influences today’s documentary films», explains Luciano Barisone, Director of Visions du Réel. The public will be invited to discover a complex and multifaceted country, populated by many ethnicities and with 11 official languages. «Reflections about the past are omnipresent, but it is the preoccupation about the present and the future of South Africa that dominates the films of these talented filmmakers», adds Luciano Barisone.
The poster of Visions du Réel’s 48th edition is from the film Coming of Age by Teboho Edkins, a South African, Lesotho and German coproduction. The medium length film was present in 2015 at Visions du Réel as international premiere.