Autoethnographic Encounters: The 56th Visions du Réel

Unspooling every spring in Nyon, Visions du Réel is known as the largest documentary film festival in Switzerland, as well as one of Europe’s most renowned. But on the shores of the ever-picturesque Lake Geneva, documentary cinema takes on a different form. The festival very adamantly stretches the boundaries of what it considers to be non-fiction filmmaking, often fully refusing to define what this means in the event’s context. “Visions du Réel” can be translated as “Visions of Reality”: there is no one ultimate truth. Even the lake here has different, but equally true, simultaneous identities: Lac Léman, in French; Genfersee, in German. And so, at the festival’s 56th edition, it felt apt to explore documentary’s long-held, complex, and yet symbiotic relationship with the concept of the “self” and its role within the cinematic form.

I have become increasingly preoccupied with film’s potential to act as an autoethnographic platform – with the term “autoethnographic” used in its loosest definition – hungry for ways of playing with the idea of self onscreen. Perhaps this is simply a selfish thought: how can I, as a person, interrogate my own experiences in the world around me through cinema, whether by making or appreciating films? Maybe it is but a way for me to separate the self that I feel is judged or evaluated daily from a performance of such that I can fantasise about simply being theoretical; I can control the narrative of an autoethnographic investigation. For me, documentary becomes the most intriguing canvas for such an exploration, given that the camera often acts as a proxy for some sort of all-seeing eye designed to present to viewers a particular perspective, and thus a certain subjectivity. There must be a self, a somebody, or a something there, it seems to insist.

At Visions du Réel, I was naturally drawn to films that I saw as incorporating an autoethnographic element in different ways. Sometimes this meant that the filmmaker was an active part of the story onscreen; other times, voiceovers lent themselves to a narrative guide from a specific angle, or else the content of the film was heavily dependent upon the filmmaker’s connection to the subjects or topic at hand. Curiously, films with this autoethnographic angle also all involved important, interconnected aspects of both place and movement. This suggested to me, at least anecdotally, an inability to separate the self from a connection to dwelling or physical locale: we are still creatures of this lived world. It also undeniably speaks to the privilege of being able to be remade, as to have the privilege to move – whether between nation-states or even to a new neighbourhood – is to have the privilege of reinvention.

Sons of Icarus

In I figli di Icaro (Sons of Icarus, Daniel Kemény, 2025), Daniel is both the filmmaker and one of the film’s two subjects, the other being the director’s younger brother Samuel (Sami). The siblings are decades apart in age, and their father left West Germany in the 1970s, fleeing a post-war political climate that still reeked of National Socialism. Daniel is Swiss by nationality and lives in Europe, while Sami holds an Italian passport but lives in Cuba with their father. Kemény crafts the brothers as foils of each other, a dynamic that he explores during a trip to Cuba. As they grew up separately in different locations and at different times, their surroundings inform a significant amount of their habitus. But Daniel repeatedly emphasises Sami’s nationality, which would allow him to essentially live burden-free in the European Union, riding the potential of reinvention over semi-permeable borders available to those who can cross them.

The kind of intimacy Kemény fosters doesn’t hinge on an emotional appeal stemming from his role as artist. Rather, he retains a strong distance between his directorial self and his more familial self, with the exception of a short German-language voiceover that opens the film, during which he reflects on the legacy that the post-war political atmosphere and connections left on his family. With this, he encourages us viewers to empathise with the brothers as an entity; neither Daniel nor Sami acknowledge the camera until the very end of the film, when each throws it a quick glance in close succession as if to say, “We know we are being watched”. This, after all, is one of Kemény’s points: that the Daniel we see in the film is only brought to life through his interactions with Sami and vice versa; Kemény, as the filmmaker, remains a separate entity altogether. He further visually connects the family through partially transparent shots of the brothers and their father together in the same frame, thus bridging, through editing, the gulf that divides them.

Senegalese filmmaker Mamadou Khouma Gueye takes a simultaneously more and less visible approach to incorporating himself into the body of his work, Liti Liti (The Attachment, 2025). A portrait of the director’s aging mother whose longtime home in the Dakar neighbourhood of Guinaw Rails is suddenly threatened by a new government railway project intended to pass directly through the residential district, Liti Liti is bookended by passages in which Gueye appears in his own film. In these short moments, he peels away that documentary façade that often separates the viewer from the story. His mother acknowledges the camera and jokes about being filmed, just as the director casually inserts himself into the frame while preoccupied with another activity. Through these moments, we learn that Gueye has been living in France, where he, too, has created a self that is separate from that known by his mother in Senegal. However, as viewers, we are privy to both sides: Gueye as a filmmaker based between Guinaw Rails and Nantes. He thus uses his brief cameos as a device to let us into and, at the end, away from the story. For the rest of the film, he takes a much more hands-off approach, recording his mother’s routine the way a stranger might.

Gueye’s mother calls this busy neighbourhood home – nearly all of her children were born and raised here, and the physical body of the house is incredibly important to her. The filmmaker notably dedicates a significant amount of time to shots of the house being sledgehammered – thud, thud, thud – every chisel seemingly chipping away a small part of his mother’s soul. As if by fate, the woman suffered a mobility-reducing stroke upon having to move, and the privilege of movement here takes on a political dimension. Gueye draws a parallel between his mother’s self as a corporeal entity and the space of dwelling to which she is deeply grounded, emotionally, physically, and spiritually; in this case, Gueye’s “self” is not as important. This may not be his own story, but it is now his to tell as the conduit who is mobile.

In 1 Rue Angarskaia (One, Angarskaia Street, Rostislav Kirpičenko, 2025), the Lithuanian-born, Ukrainian-raised filmmaker Kirpičenko uses his proximity to his subjects to interrogate both a sense of place and a sense of self situated within a particular time: in this case, his hometown of Dnipro, Ukraine, in the wake of the Russian invasion. As he notes in a quiet, undramatic voiceover in French, he has lived in Paris for the last six years, highlighting the great divide that exists between his life in Paris and Dnipro. Kirpičenko uses these pieces of voiceover as personal reflections to situate us within a story, but always talking diegetically from a metaphorical “behind-the-camera” vantage point, never appearing in front of it except in windowed reflections. He says he has decided to return to Ukraine for two weeks in an attempt to visit his titular childhood home as a way of “trying to forgive myself for not going to fight”, with the film doubling as a personal journey and a means to interrogate one’s self and one’s actions. His mother begs him to stay due to the potential danger that awaits him in Ukraine, but he insists that this act of movement is most crucial now. Reflecting on memory is not enough: for Kirpičenko, the self must be rediscovered by physically travelling to the place where it was made, carved, and moulded.

“I look at my past life like a museum visitor,” he says at one point, recording detailed audio accounts of friends and acquaintances in Ukraine. Through pensive voiceover, he describes those around him as if providing an ethnographic study of his encounters and interactions, with a focus on the clarity of his remarks. He goes as far as turning a critical eye on them – for instance, as they watch a New Year’s speech by Volodymyr Zelensky, where they laugh at the melodrama of his delivery and the music. The filmmaker uses the emotional proximity to his family to better understand his own plight, enquiring whether they still feel any connection to Lithuania. Yet, his grandfather apparently has no idea how to answer, staring blankly before moving on and ignoring the question; only when pressed by the filmmaker does he admit that Ukraine is his home.

Kirpičenko’s construction of self in 1 Rue Angarskaia becomes a synecdoche for those among us with any type of experience with movement or migration. Living in France has literally changed his sense of self. “The gap has become too wide”, he ponders, adding that he can’t seem to feel what it might be like to live in Ukraine, now that he is but a visitor. In his family’s case, migrating was a necessity, through which a new self was made in the image of the adoptive country they now call their own. For the filmmaker, who moved abroad to study, a slightly different experience takes shape: he still dreams about being in what he calls his “real home”, or what was created on Angarskaia Street during his long-lost childhood. But in an ironic twist, he never manages to enter his old house, its tenants having fled right after the start of the war, leaving it vacant. As we watch the building and its small postbox outside, we feel as though something has been lost to time.

Autostop

Of the films discussed here, Autostop (Roman Hüben, 2025) is perhaps the most uncoupled from conventions around the depiction of self in documentary work, yet it plays with the idea in increasingly unique ways. The filmmaker himself is not the autoethnographic subject; Autostop instead focuses on stage actor Floriane Mésenge, who recorded conversations she had while hitchhiking over the years. Floriane recreates her experiences with the help of two other actors, Maxime Gorbatchevsky and Jean-Daniel Piguet, who together play the parts of all of the people Floriane met on the road – regardless of gender, linguistic background, or physicality – and repeat the conversations verbatim with the help of visible earpieces. Floriane is thus the self on which we are focused, even though we know this self is seemingly chimerical, having been remade multiple times over: first by the act of hitchhiking itself, then through audio recordings, and, finally, the encounters’ reenactment.

On a purely thematic level, Hüben’s film deals ever-so-naturally with the self as a mobile, fluid state, made and remade on the road. Every interaction Floriane has changes her personality and persona, and she shifts between them as she interacts with different people. She has a “declared” home, but as we see her, she is on the road as a hitchhiker; her being perpetually in transit is also a form of stasis. As Floriane herself reenacts her past interactions, we begin to recognise that we are witnessing multiple superimposed layers of herself. Evoking, but never imitating, the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, the filmmaker invites us to consider the varied abstractions of Floriane as they are performed for us.

Slowly, we begin to realise that there is no singular self to be discovered, no truth to be sought out or found. Autostop, meaning “hitchhike”, could plausibly pass as a fully observational documentary or else be completely scripted – precisely because it’s both at the same time. The film uses nonscripted content to act as a script, creating a sort of Schrodinger’s docufiction along the way. The earbuds that the three actors use are fully visible the entire time, a choice which, at first, appears to break the illusion of a fictional work; the same goes for the costumes and light makeup, just as one of the actors plays a woman. However, in a fascinating way, these choices never take us out of the scenarios, which grow in both hilarity and fear, as Floriane meets more and more bizarre characters of varying sketchiness. In a Brechtian fashion, Hüben also breaks the fourth wall with a few moments in which the trio discusses the difficulty of recreating the scenes, either technically or emotionally.

As I write this, it has become clear to me that, in a meta sort of way, some forms of film criticism can be seen as autoethnographic practice; this is especially the case for writing that is intentionally highly subjective and more personally informed. While I would not call this an autoethnographic piece, given that I do not speak in detail about the actual experience of watching each film, autoethnography has something important to add to the field of criticism beyond investigation of a filmic work. Writers may reflect on a sociocultural circumstance by utilising the interaction between self and society, analysing lived experience, such as the particulars of a film festival experience or even the observation of a spectatorial environment, as a crucial reflexive process. Films with the aforementioned autoethnographic qualities thus bring this unique method of engagement full circle, offering us something further beyond those quiet, powerful moments in the dark.

Visions du Réel
4 – 13 April 2025
https://visionsdureel.ch