Emilie Bujès, the artistic director of the Visions du Réel documentary film festival.
Keystone-SDA
Film director Xisi Sofia Ye Chen has received the Grand Prize in the International Feature Film Competition at Switzerland’s Visions du Réel festival for her documentary From Dawn to Dawn.
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The documentary marks the feature-length debut of Xisi Sofia Ye Chen, a Spanish director and screenwriter born to Chinese immigrant parents.
From Dawn to Dawn follows the daily life of the director’s brother, A Wen, a Chinese gangster living in Spain. Without judgment or fascination, she observes a complex man, torn between a criminal legacy, loyalty, family responsibilities and the search for new moral bearings.
It has been hailed “for its accuracy and distance”, the festival organisers said in a press release on Friday.
+ Documentaries are the strength of Swiss cinema
The National Competition prize went to Nicole Nicole. Lauren Dällenbach’s feature debut describes with great tenderness, humour and complexity the codependent relationship between her aunt Nicole and her grandmother Alberte, while imagining possible paths toward emancipation to ease their fear of living alone.
Visions du Réel ends on Sunday evening, with several screenings devoted to the award-winning films.
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Translated from French with DeepL/sb
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