This feature covers the 57th edition of Visions du Réel, a Swiss documentary festival emphasizing art-house nonfiction and thematic displacement narratives. Menthonnex and Bucher’s The Round Table documents a town hall meeting in Wolfisberg (population 187) where residents discuss opening a migrant shelter, revealing underlying xenophobic anxieties masked as practical concerns about noise and safety. Shot in stark black-and-white, the film exposes barely-concealed prejudices through deadpan observation. José Luis Guerín’s Good Valley Stories, which premiered at San Sebastián in 2025 and won the festival’s Perception Change Award, examines Vallbona, a economically depleted Barcelona suburb. Constructed as a polyphonic oral history, Guerín’s work—his first feature in a decade—echoes the formal sophistication of his 2007 narrative film In the City of Sylvia while addressing themes of personal and collective obsolescence across seven languages. Both films exemplify VdR’s commitment to socially-engaged documentary cinema beyond simplistic messaging.
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