Fiction goes Nyon
What is a fiction film doing at one of Europe’s most important documentary festivals? The question inevitably arose when Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind appeared in this year’s programme of Visions du Réel. Set in Massachusetts in 1970, it follows an amateur art thief who stumbles through a poorly conceived robbery. There are actors, a script, carefully composed scenes—everything that would traditionally place the film outside the documentary field. And yet, after ninety minutes in Reichardt’s company, the distinction begins to feel surprisingly irrelevant. Perhaps this is because Visions du Réel has gradually ceased to define itself as a festival of documentaries in the narrow sense. Over the years, it has become something more ambitious: a place where cinema is valued for the way it approaches reality rather than for the production methods behind it. The real is not guaranteed by the absence of actors. It emerges through a certain attention to the world. Kelly Reichardt has practised that attention for more than thirty years. She has often been described as the great minimalist of American independent cinema, but the label is misleading. Her films are not minimalist because little happens. They are minimalist because she refuses to tell us where to look. Meaning is never imposed. It accumulates slowly, through gestures, pauses, landscapes, conversations that drift without obvious dramatic purpose. Watching a Reichardt film resembles watching a documentary whose participants happen to know the outline of the story. The Mastermind disguises itself as a heist movie, but almost immediately abandons the pleasures normally associated with the genre. Suspense dissolves into waiting. The robbery itself matters less than the circumstances surrounding it: the atmosphere of a country fractured by the Vietnam War, suburban routines, economic uncertainty, the quiet exhaustion of ordinary lives. The camera remains attentive to rooms, streets, weather and silence with the same patience that characterises observational documentary. Nothing insists on becoming symbolic. Everything is allowed simply to exist. This is where Reichardt’s cinema reveals its documentary affinity. Her films never seem interested in illustrating ideas. They observe situations until meaning gradually emerges from the material itself. Houses, clothing, trees, empty parking lots and hesitant conversations possess the same importance as the protagonists. The world is never reduced to a backdrop for narrative. One senses that reality is continuously resisting the screenplay—and that Reichardt welcomes this resistance instead of correcting it. There is also an ethical dimension to her filmmaking. Reichardt refuses the spectacular, even when genre conventions invite it. Violence remains awkward rather than exciting. Failure is never romanticised. Characters are neither heroes nor villains but individuals trying, often unsuccessfully, to navigate historical forces larger than themselves. It is an approach that recalls the best documentary practice: refusing easy judgement while trusting the viewer’s intelligence. In this sense, The Mastermind does not stretch the identity of Visions du Réel. It clarifies it. Contemporary documentary festivals increasingly understand that the most interesting division in cinema is no longer between fiction and non-fiction. The more meaningful distinction lies elsewhere: between films that manipulate reality into ready-made narratives and films that remain genuinely curious about the world’s complexity. Reichardt belongs unmistakably to the latter category. That is perhaps why her work felt so completely at home in Nyon. Not because The Mastermind pretends to be a documentary, but because it shares documentary’s deepest ambition: to make us look again at what we thought we already knew. Perhaps that is what Visions du Réel wanted to celebrate by inviting Kelly Reichardt as its guest of honour. Not a filmmaker who crosses the border between fiction and documentary, but one who quietly demonstrates that, for the most attentive cinema, the border has never mattered very much. The most documentary gesture in The Mastermind is that it never claims to possess reality. It simply observes until fiction acquires the density of lived experience. In a festival devoted to the cinema of the real, that proved not to be a contradiction, but a reminder of what cinema, at its finest, can still do. Nyon goes fiction? No. It is the masterfull fiction going Nyon.