This year at Visions du Réel 2026, HEAD – Genève's Cinema Department brings a graduation film to its world premiere: Reminiscence, directed by Iryna Melnichenko. The film grew out of the Bachelor in Cinema program and was made entirely by a team trained at the school. It tells the story of a young Ukrainian woman, now a refugee in Switzerland, navigating fragmented memories and the complexity of her family bonds.

The selection comes at a particularly resonant moment: this edition of the festival also features Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa as a special guest, with a masterclass and a full retrospective of his work exploring memory, history, and political representation. Reminiscence engages with that same territory, on a more intimate scale.

Beyond this graduation film, HEAD is represented through several other works: Alea Jacarandas by Hassen Ferhani, a regular contributor to the department; To the Moon and Back by Elisa Gomez Alvarez, an alumna of the ECAL-HEAD Master's programme, produced by Palmyre Badinier, a lecturer at the HEAD; La Voix du troupeau by Matthias Joulaud, also from the Master's programme; and Une chambre à elles by Lucia Martinez. Der Runde Tisch was edited by Selin Dettwiler, another alumna of the same programme.