While there is an increasing tendency in contemporary moving-image arts to tackle the issue of how images mediate the world, the recent works of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor invite viewers to pay attention to what cannot be mediated by images, for image-making is as much a physical encounter as it is a medium.

Winning the Golden Leopard at this year’s Locarno Film Festival for his latest film, Mrs. Fang, Wang Bing is the second documentary director in recent years—after Gianfranco Rosi—to earn the top award from a major European art film festival, which historically tends to favor fiction over non-fiction.