The main prize of Visions du Réel 2016, the Sesterce d'or La Mobilière, was awarded to Chinese director Shengze Zhu for her film "Another Year". The Interreligious Jury awarded its prize to "Liberation, The User's Guide" by Alexander Kuznetsov, and picked two films for Commendations in addition.
The festival has selected 180 films from 49 countries. The Interreligious Jury chose its award winners from the 20 films of the competition for full-length films. In other competition sections the festival showed medium-length and short films, first films and innovative films ("Régards neuf"), and, in the section entitled "Grand Angle", a selection of the latest best documentary films among which the audience chose their award winner.
The artistic director of the festival, Luciano Barisone, has described the central idea guiding his film selection as an "act of resistance" which he relates to the spiritual dimension of cinema. He used remarkable words to convey his vision of film: "It is no coincidence that we have often talked of the cinema as a sacred place in which we worship. It is in this quest for invocation that film accomplishes its mission of resistance. But what exactly are we resisting? We are resisting the privation of the basic necessities of a material and spiritual life. We are resisting the eradication of values and human rights. We are resisting oblivion, approval and silence. We are resisting indifference."
British director Peter Greenaway was honoured by a lifetime achievement award as "Maître du Réel". As an hommage, his latest film, "Eisenstein in Guanajuato" was screened, a fictitious account of the Russian director's journey to Mexico. Thus, the festival underlined its encompassing notion of a cinema obliged to reality, breaking the limits of an academic understanding of documentaries.
Link: Festival website