The Envision Competition offers 12 unparalleled films, each of them stylistically arresting, as visionary filmmakers forge new cinematic languages. Within the program, a number of directors reappropriate their own cultural narratives through existing footage. Elsewhere in Envision, filmmakers experiment with staging reality. Collective filmmaking also finds a place in this section, with collaborative partnerships at the heart of several titles.
Films in this section
A stimulating and vivid portrait of a generation, about a group of young people in their thirties and their relationships in Paris between 2019 and 2021. With a macabre news item as a common thread, we gradually get to know who they are.
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A group of fabulous trans women gather to honor their deceased friend Antonia in a way denied to her by her family, who buried Antonia in men’s clothes. Politics, pain and joie de vivre combine in this rousing and heartwarming tribute.
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Excerpts spanning Iranian film history show that women have always been oppressed, also in the years before the Islamic Revolution. Undaunted, Mania Akbari takes on the male gaze in this confrontational essay.
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A hyperdynamically edited film about the first free elections in Serbia in 1990, which were won by Slobodan Milošević. Five presidential candidates of the time look back, and TV clips show the almost-surreal, circus-like election atmosphere.
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The spiritually minded vagabond Zhighou Sun guides the viewer through the extraordinary world of the “Foreigners Street” Chinese amusement park in Chongqing, a surreal sanctuary full of strange structures, from UFOs to an Egyptian pyramid.
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Filmmaker Efthymia Zymvragaki combines the story of a perpetrator and her own experiences with violence in a poetic film that offers insight into the causes and consequences of abuse.
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A dark mosaic of often-shocking videos that Russian teenagers have posted on social media. Clip after clip shows how aggression and oppression in schools is unwittingly passed on to the next generation.
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Filmmaker Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez uses family photographs, extracts from letters and audio recordings to construct a loving portrait of her exiled theater director father Mohsen Sadoon Yasin, and an elegy to their lost homeland of Iraq.
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A playfully styled portrait loosely based on memoirs published in 1889, evoking recollections of an unspoiled Chile that reflect on the here and now. But the portrayal also sheds light on what has been lost through colonization and modernization.
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Refugees are often in the news, but what do we really know about their experiences? Notes on Displacement takes a deep dive into the fear and disorientation felt by a Syrian family on the grueling journey to a better life.
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A playful, personal, political and uncompromising self-portrait of a group of non-binary and trans friends in Brazil. Their colorful raw material shows them shaping their lives off the beaten track.
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In an abandoned factory, a father and daughter time travel through their past of migration. In search of answers, they discuss the choices that were made when they fled from the former Yugoslavia to the Netherlands, and a family trauma unfolds.
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