VISIO Production Fund 2025/2026
Olukemi Lijadu
Rafik Greiss
Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Maxime is the recipient of the €5,000 grant provided by Human Company, a long-established company and a leading name in Italy’s open-air hospitality sector.
Sister Sister
by Olukemi Lijadu
co-produced with Frac Bretagne
Sister Sister deepens an ongoing exploration of what remains when one half of a cosmic union passes. Drawing on Yoruba complementary dualism, which hold that the immaterial (including spiritual) world is just as real as the material world, the film follows the bond between the artist’s aunts, the Lijadu Sisters. They embodied this duality as revolutionary artists and Ifá priestesses. Fearless in their prime, they were the first woman-led West African band to achieve global acclaim, yet later created refugia in Harlem. Growing up, Olukemi Lijadu sought her aunts and found sanctuary in their bond. Sister Sister captures their bravery, home, and care.
Untitled
by Rafik Greiss
co-produced with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Kunsthalle Bern and Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci
Conceived as a cinematic essay, Greiss’s film unfolds through fragments, accelerations, pauses, and returns. Drifting through Cairo, Alexandria, the Western Desert, and other sites, the work moves across dreamlike settings, reflecting on how time and memory are held, who is permitted to witness or remember, and how history takes shape as it wavers between fact and fiction.
It Would Be Alright
by Maxime Jean-Baptiste
co-produced with Batalha Centro de Cinema, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Escautville and Biennale de Lyon
“It Would Be Alright” draws on his experience as an extra in a TV adaptation of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, where he was cast as a slave aboard a replica ship and subjected to aggressive treatment by other actors, leading him to quit. Years later, he revisits this experience in a short fiction film set during a casting session. It follows Camille, a character based on the artist, whose audition monologue exposes the violence and power dynamics of the casting process, questioning cinema’s structures and the impact of reenacting violent histories on Black bodies.