Doc Weekly’s Hot Tips for Cinéma du réel 2025
Doc Weekly is attending this year’s unique edition of Cinéma du réel. In anticipation of the museum’s 5 year renovation, the cornerstone event of Paris’ experimental documentary scene is migrating south, from the tubular walls of the Centre Pompidou to the Latin quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where screenings will be split between four independent cinemas.
Each film institutions in their own right, L’Arlequin, the Reflet Médicis, the Saint-André des Arts and the Christine Cinéma Club will be hosting screenings for the 47th edition of Cinéma du réel from the 22nd to the 29th of march 2025.
As with every edition, we’ve been blown away by the profusion of forms, subjects and artistic experimentation at play in this festival that’s always prepared to make bold programming choices. This year’s selection has 37 national and international premieres in its competition section and a particularly rich program of special screenings.
Here are our top tips from the competing films and beyond, to help you make sense of this year’s vast selection !
Ancestral Visions of the Future by Lemohang Mosese
Opening this year’s edition fresh from its world premiere at Berlinale is Lemohang Mosese’s striking Ancestral Visions of the Future.
From the dusty gravel roads where he played with toy wire cars as a seven-year-old to the dispassionate streets of exile where he dissolved into anonymity, the director confronts the moments that shattered and shaped him. An elegy for a city, country and a people caught between the weight of memory and the inevitability of loss, it’s also a film about cinema and its power. If the trailer is anything to go by, it’s sure to be an exceptional experience.
Being John Smith by John Smith
After enduring many decades of embarrassment, John Smith finally admits in Being John Smith that possessing the most common name in the English-speaking world has had a negative impact on his sense of self.
A film coursing with dry British wit that looks to make genius use of script and editing.
Jimmy by Yashaddai Owens
In November 1948, James Baldwin left New York and, thanks to a fellowship grant, relocated to Paris. The 24-year-old writer would spend most of the next decade there. Jimmy is a portrait of the artist reconnecting with the world.
Shot in black and white16mm, with hardly any dialogue and with James Baldwin reincarnated by actor Benny O Arthur, we’re very excited to discover this bold and beautiful imagining of this rich period of the writer and civil rights activist’s life.
Monikondee by Lonnie Van Brummelen, Siebren De Haan / Tolin Erwin Alexander
In Monikondee, a boatman delivers cargo to remote Indigenous and Maroon communities along the river bordering Suriname and French Guiana. His winding journey offers an inside look into the complex challenge of maintaining local customs in the face of rampant gold mining, multinational corporations, and a changing climate.
Having its world premiere in the competition section, this looks to be a sumptuous travel documentary that delves beyond, showing anthropological and ethnological sensitivity and an artistic touch.
About the Pink Cocoon by Binyu Wang
The director’s elder sister Jiao awaits childbirth in a pink maternity ward, speculation and expectation from women of four generations in my family superimpose and collide with their physical throes and haunting memories.
About the Pink Cocoon is having its world premiere in Paris.
Country Queer (Pédale Rurale) by Antoine Vazquez
Benoît built his paradise hidden from view, emancipated in his own way, resolved to face the constraints of a space which, in imaginations, conflicts with his identity. The countryside. One day, he and other queers from the area decide to organise the first Pride of the Périgord vert.
Having its world premiere in the Popular Front(s) section, Country Queer is a film supported by Tënk that we’re excited discover on the big screen !
Adnan Being and Time by Marie Valentine Regan
An expressionistic portrait of the great Etel Adnan, immersed in her art and the world. Working without ego, Adnan asks, what does it mean to be alive, to live through catastrophe, to experience time. A journey of a film, Adnan Being and Time looks to take us into the mind of Adnan and further still.
Hommage à la Catalogne by Frédéric Goldbronn
In Homage to Catalonia George Orwell recounts his involvement in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. As anyone who’s read it will know, the book is haunted by images. These images exist, in the reports filmed by the anarchist operators of the CNT, and have been carefully restored and archived.
Hommage à la Catalogne aims to share Orwell’s experience in Spain through a new cinema experience that will be sure to intrigue anyone who has interest in the legendary writer.
She Boars (Les Sanglières) by Elsa Brès
In the 16th century, in a forest in the Cévennes in France, peasant women from different regions band together to fight the fencing of common land. A few centuries later, construction is taking place in the forest under the watchful eye of Annie, a solitary 75-year-old night watchwoman. One night, the landscape is turned upside down.
She Boars is having its world premiere in Cinéma du réel’s competition section
Archipelago of Earthen Bones - To Bunya by Malena Szlam
The luminous flora, volcanic geographies, and plunging horizons of the Gondwana Rainforest in the eastern ranges of Australia metamorphose into an imaginary landscape in this, the most experimental film of our selection.
We can’t wait to discover these and many more films at this year’s edition of Cinéma du réel.
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