2023 Editorial Editorial
Thirty-fifth edition for those who care to count. Thirty-four years was the age of one of the characters in the first volume of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel The Roads to Freedom entitled The Age of Reason. In the philosopher’s novelistic writing, the point of view is very present. Linking time, a point of view and freedom can seem a truism or an association made too speedily and yet… The disconnections of these three terms, three spaces or three actions provoked by the failures of our experience of time, on the rise in our hyper-connected societies, seem to have some connection with certain forms of alienation. We can still hope that the work on films, their fabrication as well as their viewing, is an attempt to articulate, to reappropriate these three experiences.
At the heart of our present time, burning in all meanings of the word and situations, this week at Lussas will be inaugurated by a reflection on the representation of justice in cinema, filming trials and the use of the image as evidence. We encounter once again the dual analyses and viewpoints of the historian Sylvie Lindeperg and the philosopher Marie José Mondzain, both particularly interested in film and the image, their power and use, this time in recording and transmitting the exercise of justice.
The meeting with a film we have been patiently awaiting, Voyage au lac and a filmmaker Emmanuelle Démoris, invites us an experience of shared time, to the discovery of a territory and those who inhabit it. A work made over a long period requiring serious commitment, as much on the part of those who make films, accompany and distribute them, in conditions which are often difficult, indeed precarious. The situation is not new but it is not improving and we continue to consider precious the time spent imagining and making films, as is that devoted to viewing them together. This year, two new filmmakers, Safia Benhaïm and Dounia Wolteche-Bovet, accompany us on these “viewing experiences” and will discuss the choice of their programme of the same name, in their words, “films which, by the path they have taken, push us into motion.”
We continue the year’s companionships by turning our attention to the films of another country, Belgium with Pauline David, a country closer to us than last year’s choice of Japan, and whose wealth of creation required us to take a closer look. These collaborations are durable and weave an international network of favoured partners, freed from the constraints of competitive festivals and moving closer to a prolonged dialogue. We also continue our long-lasting companionship with Federico Rossin, with an approach to the history of film in a country with a highly tormented political and social history, Colombia, prolonged by a closer examination of the films of Luis Ospina.
In its primary function as mediator, the festival proposes works from film history and contemporary creations oriented by a thirst for transmission and discovery. The rigour of a critical point of view accompanies each encounter with a film, an approach to cinematic creation which – despite the distance and reflection it implies, its analytical and theoretical quality – remains nonetheless sensitive. To inaugurate “the critical exercise” and to offer you some practice in the art of speaking on films, we have invited Romain Lefebvre of the Cahiers du cinéma to choose and share his way of looking at a film.
The reappropriation of time also passes through the event of a projection when films register in our memory as experience. With Gaëlle Rouard, all the moments of cinema, from the fabrication of the images to their projection, form an unforgettable experimental process.
And to end the festival in this “Année du documentaire 2023”, an event organised with considerable support from the Cinémathèque du documentaire, the CNC and the Scam, we close with an exceptional cine-concert!
Pascale Paulat and Christophe Postic