2023 Viewing experiences Viewing experiences
Our turn to gather in the harvest of this year’s films.
While the perception of time is ever more accelerating, it is singularly difficult to search for the meaning, recover the traces and take the time to tell the story of what has been lived.
Looking at films at the heart of a period saturated by state violence – the demonstrations against raising the retirement age, the events at Sainte-Soline, police violence in the suburbs and the dissolution of the “Soulèvements de la Terre” – pushed us to search almost feverishly for films that would help us to think about the abnormal state of our government and its blindness to the absolute urgency of facing the issues of ecology.
This obliged us to bury the fantasy of finding ultra-contemporary films that would simultaneously grapple with the present, be profoundly anchored in reality and whose formal audacity would be of no less quality than their construction of meaning.
We received many good films, we were moved and questioned by a number of them. Little by little, tunes began to make connections; recurrent patterns guided us towards our choice of programme. Films which were sometimes very different in their subject or form, when placed side by side could intimate a message that neither confronted directly. We took seriously the process that is at the heart of the cinematic gesture, editing, making the sometimes risky bet that the conjunction of several films could cause original reflection to emerge. So it is themes that circulate within the screenings but also between them, because we perceived the way in which a certain number of films addressed similar questions, with insistence.
In the confined of En attendant les robots, where a young man works on invisible micro-tasks that still require a human hand to feed the AI, something seems to strangely resonate with the Chinese crabs that have invaded Belgium in Une si longue marche. This something, never named in these films, never made explicit, indicates a certain broken state of our reality produced by a globalisation gone mad, and also reveals the timid but vital grip on the state of the planet provided by the capacity to think about it.
Another question, ever present, is colonisation and the forms taken by decolonisation – and above all the way in which the explosions of this history continue to inhabit, indeed to haunt our present. The films don’t stop at what is an already precious taking of stock, they dig deeper into the denial, highlight unthought-of intricacies and, from an assumed subjectivity, in the same gesture, work with emotions and thought (Non-aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels; Colette et Justin; Don’t Worry About India).
In an almost parallel movement, there are filmmakers who question the lands and traditions that are still a source of life. Some of these films testify to the difficulties of connecting with communities whose traditions are still alive but damaged or on hold, threatened by new forms of colonisation (Adieu Sauvage, The Imaginary Tatars). The issue of capitalist predation runs through many films – yet a film like Mascarades shows how, discreetly and with a muted kind of slyness, a people resists what is being forced upon them.
And like a subterranean melody within the patterns themselves, still family stories persist. Daughters who talk to their mothers, but also sons who try to make their fathers speak, to open, often with difficulty, some form of communication. As if the filmmakers were drawing from some inexhaustible source of emotion, whatever the spirit of the times. Some of these films question the link when the parent/child relation seems almost reversed (Les Yeux ouverts), or the heritage of a family story connected to History (Je reviens dans cinq minutes ; Where Do I Belong?). Others manage, starting from a similar point, to suggest a state of the world with singular power.
Family stories expand to the chosen families that make up communities. Those that disband, those that reform, those that reinvent themselves. Beyond any ideal or ideology, they recount attempts to live together, to occupy the cracks and faults, to create specific worlds on a planet where universal ideals have failed. And where the joy of living survives (En communauté; Otro Sol; Mascarades; Transfariana).
Our position as filmmakers programming films sometimes seemed uncomfortable, in particular at the crucial moment of choice. The long, intimate and sometimes difficult work that we feel in the gestures of filmmakers becomes a mirror image of our own work, our own difficulties in finding the adequate forms to speak of the present and of what motivates us. Sensing all the long and patient labour that goes into a film makes it particularly difficult to leave it aside, and yet this is part of the game.
There are those good films we do not particularly want to share, the films we liked but did not find their place. Rather than beautiful films closed in on themselves, we preferred films where sometimes filmmakers moved outside their comfort zone at the risk of getting lost. Rather than films that assess a situation, we preferred films which, by the path they have taken, push us into motion.
This has led us to programme films in a wide variety of forms: formally classic films, which confront past and present from a subjective point of view that gives them their strength; unpretentious, humble but powerful films; short fables that evoke our link with the living world, hovering over the horizon of catastrophe or choosing to inhabit it; or playful forms, which, by mixing documentary and fiction, re-interrogate the ways of telling a story, by shifting points of view and role-playing, sometimes in an almost picaresque or baroque way. These are films that don’t tell the viewer what to think, but which, through their editing, powerfully activate the mechanics of thought. But in the films we chose the form adapts organically to what is being filmed, to what needs to be told. Form is not an arbitrary choice, a posture, but a necessity that becomes one with the narrative.
Safia Benhaïm and Dounia Wolteche-Bovet
Debates led by Safia Benhaïm and Dounia Wolteche-Bovet.
In the presence of the filmmakers and/or producers.