Football Fanatics, Nuclear Waste, and Elon Musk’s Phallic Martian Fever Dreams at Visions du Réel 2025

One thing I like to do at a film festival is go for a run. Maintaining the sense of a bubble at these things can be crucial: once entered, it’s best to remain in its unusual hold or risk forgetting why you’re there in the first place. But find yourself with a loose half-hour or so and it’s nice to get a sense of the surrounding area. For obvious reasons, many of the best festivals take place in locations where the wealthy like to go, meaning: they are usually low on population and easy on the eye, both of which are the casual runner’s dream. Jog a mile inland from the town of Nyon, where the Visions du Réel documentary festival takes place each spring, and you’ll likely end up alone amidst rolling screensaver-ready fields of Swiss farmland. Head the other way and you’ll meet the crystal waters of Lake Geneva and a dazzling panorama of the Alps on the opposite side, where even the grand old head of Mont Blanc can be seen peeking out on a clear day.

Scuttling along those waters one morning, I came across the headquarters of EUFA, home to Europe’s governing body of all things football and the kind of glassy, Bond-villain layer that stands out in Switzerland: new money shouting amongst the whispers. The organization has nothing to do with Visions du Réel, of course, but the sport was conspicuous this year for its presence. One guest of honor was New Romanian Cinema alum Corneliu Porumboiu, a director responsible for two of the most left-field football documentaries ever made: The Second Game and Infinite Football. Both of those films screened, as did another unconventional football doc called Ultras by the Swedish filmmaker Ragnhild Ekner. A globe-hopping, idealistic, panoramic essay on football fanaticism, Ultras guides the viewer to as far-flung corners of the footballing world as Argentina, Morocco, Indonesia, and the English coastal town of Eastbourne, willingly focusing on the kind of fans that the money men back in EUFA HQ are at best ambivalent towards, at worst openly hostile.

Ekner’s film is a love letter to the most joyful aspects of attending football matches: the colors, the noise, the all-too-rare sense of community and solidarity they can offer. In a wise omission, the antagonists are not the usual violent hooligans (an increasingly fringe aspect of the game that documentaries tend to fetishise) but the kind of forces that have driven the upper echelons of the game toward sanitized homogeneity, sucking up capital while leaving everyone else fighting for scraps. One of the few times hooliganism is directly referenced in the film is in some clips of supporters on the march, all in black, with an Italian man in voiceover describing their uniformity as “boring”––probably exactly the amount of attention they deserve. Ultras is a film about the variety and diversity of these spaces and a convincing argument (if one was needed) for them to be nurtured, not demonized.

To Use a Mountains

Speaking of spaces that could use a bit more nurturing: Casey Carter’s fascinating documentary To Use a Mountain examines the U.S. Department of Energy’s attempts to find a suitable place to dump the toxic waste of the Manhattan Project and subsequent atomic-weapon tests. In 1982, six locations were considered, each of which Carter journeys to in a film that is both a retrospective look at administrative naivety and callousness and a fascinating geological travelogue. Each section has its own flavor, some of which are frankly more interesting than others, making unusual Carter’s choice to give each one relatively equal screen time. Amongst the best are Nevada, in which Carter meets a charismatic former uranium miner and VW tour guide; and the protest movements in both Texas and Yucca, the latter of which provides the film its stirring finale. In each, Carter’s contemporary footage is blended with archival, some of which contains the same faces from the people we meet in the present day, still out there gallantly fighting the good fight; all the while Carter threads it with some of the most jazzy use of onscreen documents I’ve seen. Seek it out.

One film at this year’s VdR that would pair nicely with Carter’s (and round out our theme of unruly projectiles) is Shifting Baselines, another story about the mess left by rockets––albeit those that stay in the sky, all going to plan. Baselines, which is not a documentary on Roger Federer’s backhand, was directed by Julien Elie, a filmmaker from Quebec who traveled to the SpaceX Base in Texas to observe Elon Musk’s phallic, martian fever dreams from the viewpoint of his most ardent fans. Shot in gorgeous, grainy black-and-white, the film watches from the deck chairs of the launch site’s outer edges, where Elie encounters a typical range of eccentrics while capturing the kind of awe-inspiring images that the SpaceX channel (recently, accurately described as Pravda-like by Marina Hyde) would do well to try copying. Elsewhere, the film digresses to ask what all that junk is doing up there, with Elie traveling to talk with a professor in Cambridge, amongst others. According to the research, the current number of active satellites spinning around the globe sits at 65,000, an alarming figure that is set to rise to over a million, all current projects going to plan. (That the film chooses not to go into the efforts being made to clean up that mess is a minor blind spot.) Watching Blue Origin lift Katy Perry and her pals to the stars earlier last week, I couldn’t help sparing a thought for Elie and his team for wrapping things up too soon. Nevertheless, the film makes its point with cosmic clarity.

Shifting Baselines

The post Football Fanatics, Nuclear Waste, and Elon Musk’s Phallic Martian Fever Dreams at Visions du Réel 2025 first appeared on The Film Stage.