2021 LaScam Day LaScam Day
Cinema is once again blooming on our screens and the trend is to documentary. No fewer than twenty-six of them at the Cannes festival this year, with major artists working in this important genre – Marco Bellocchio, Shlomi Elkabetz, Charlotte Gainsbourg. A major American newspaper commented on Nomadland, the film by Chloé Zhao awarded the 2021 Oscar for Best Picture, emphasised that it “radiates the power of documentary”.
Here at Lussas, we are not “inspired by real facts”, we breathe them.
Here, more than anywhere else, this reality that is supposed to be stronger than fiction, we grasp it with both hands.
LaScam, which federates French creators working in all the disciplines of the real, presents each year several pearls selected from the 2021 harvest of our “Brouillon d’un rêve” (“Sketch of a dream”) programme. This is one of the oldest seed funds that directly finance film and media creators. There are some who detect in the word “sketch” the idea of a quick drawing from which major works are born. Others see the initial, ephemeral and profuse outlines of all creations of the mind. Still others note that the name of the programme conjures up the heady, difficult to seize notion of a “dream”.
A dream, so be it. The metaphysics of creation: the more you dream, the more likely the film will be anchored in the real. To translate the state of mind of twenty-year-old youth at the beginning of the millennium, I remember having fantasised a character who would embody the major trends of his generation, socially conscious and open to the world, out of sync with triumphant capitalism, at home with precariousness, of which he would have made a source of strength. I had traced the outline, sketched an imaginary composite drawing and then I met Rachid. He was a union organiser at McDonald’s who carried all that with him, and much besides. I filmed Rachid in the agitation of the anti-globalisation demonstrations in Genoa, then in New York where he was to meet his friend Yamina, to whom he wanted to declare his love. It was in September 2001 and Rachid found himself tossed into the chaos of the beginning of the 2000s. I had dreamed Rachid, reality offered him to me. Films which are dreamt so strongly often become those to which one is most attached.
The same thing is said of children.
Rémi Lainé, filmmaker, president of LaScam