18/03/2016 - From 18-27 March, the 38th edition of the festival will plunge into the world of documentaries, boasting some major names on its line-up

The 38^th edition of the Cinéma du Réel Film Festival kicks off today in Paris, after the screening of the opening film, Avi Mograbi’s Between Fences [+see also:
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film profile]. Unspooling until 27 March, the rich programme rustled up by artistic director Maria Bonsanti (read the interview) will allow attendees to keep their fingers on the pulse of the latest trends in global documentary production, a field that is really booming in the media at the moment.

Standing out among the 11 features in the international competition are five European productions: The Dreamed Ones [+see also:
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film profile] by Austrian director Ruth Beckermann (revealed in the Berlinale Forum and which recently won the Grand Diagonale Prize in Graz), the highly personal La Deuxième Nuit by Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels, Dustur [+see also:
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film profile] by Italy’s Marco Santarelli (set in a prison in Bologna, where a Catholic monk and a Muslim intermediary lead a workshop on the Italian Constitution), Oleg y las raras artes [+see also:
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film profile] by Spaniard Andrés Duque (centring on 80-something Russian pianist Oleg Nikolaevich Karavaichuk) and the Franco-Syrian co-production Mouhassaron mithli by Hala Alabdalla (which revolves around a dinner organised by a committed Syrian publisher who has been in exile in France for the last 50 years). The other selected films hail from Russia, the United States, Vietnam, Chile and India.

The international competition for debut films also delves into completely different areas, with titles such as Ganesh Yourself by French director Emmanuel Grimaud and its robot made to look like the titular God, which answers the questions posed by believers in Mumbai during the festival dedicated to Him; and Les héritiers by his fellow countryman Maxence Voiseux, which shines the spotlight on a group of farmer siblings in Artois, France. Il matrimonio by Italy’s Paola Salerno gets stuck into the preparations for a wedding in Calabria, while In the Darkness of the Movie Theater I Take Off My Shoes by Cláudia Varejão explores the world of the Portuguese National Ballet, and the Belgian production Reveka by Christopher Yates and Benjamin Colaux follows the trail of four Bolivian miners.

Meanwhile, in the French competition, we find titles by Eugène Green, Christophe Bisson, Alice Diop, Emmanuel Licha, Matthieu Chatelier, Judith Abitbol, Nicolas Hans Martin, Georgi Lazarevski, Catalina Villar, Neil Beloufa, and duo Raphaël Girardot and Vincent Gaullier.

Also of note are the special screenings for The Event by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, Zud [+see also:
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film profile] by Poland’s Marta Minorowicz, On Football [+see also:
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interview: Sergio Oksman
film profile] by Sergio Oskman, Innocence of Memories [+see also:
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interview: Grant Gee
film profile] by British director Grant Gee (the result of a collaboration with Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and will be making the journey to Paris), Here Be Dragons [+see also:
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film profile] by his fellow countryman Mark Cousins and SebastianO by Italy’s Fabrizio Ferraro, as well as a Franco Piavoli retrospective, and a plethora of guests, including directors Frederik Wiseman and Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

(Translated from French)