2019 La Scam Day La Scam Day
“What a time!”
Juggling between things unsaid and questions that disturb. Breaking the silence. Then probing into the heart of the noise, the failed transmissions, the fatigue of bodies, the blank zones of memory and politics. “DISTURB YOUR CITY.”[1] Films act as kinds of subversive dances, vacuums waiting to be filled, confessions of love or distaste arriving from afar, gentle, subtle or outraged trances, attacking the forces that constrain and limit…
For this day spotlighting five films which received aid at the writing stage from La Scam’s “Brouillon d’un rêve” seed fund, seventy films were viewed, all completed since the last edition of the États généraux du film documentaire. Seventy films burning with a common dream of cinema. It is this flame that brings together documentary filmmakers who participate in the reading of the nine hundred proposals submitted to La Scam each year.
Year after year, “Brouillon d’un rêve” films gauge the pulse of creation, but also of the world. There are more and more films that continue their route beyond a festival or a broadcast to become travelling objects feeding reflection here and there. Year after year, the “Brouillons d’un rêve” remain true to their promises of becoming audacious, personal, committed and sincere works of art. Born of inner questioning, they shake up our cultural and economic models, our societies that oscillate between too much noise and too much silence. Films on the edge, born of a unique dialogue, of a sort of collective artistic support by and for the authors; a dialogue that weaves indefectible links between La Scam and its members. The engagement is total. It ceaselessly questions the documentary gesture and its moral responsibility, pushes them to their limits. It emancipates, shifts, digs out a place in the world for each person.
It is the permanent construction by a young woman of a path towards her inner voice and its strife. It is the vertiginous confrontation with an ecological disaster. It is the placing of a hyphen between two first names and making this, with delicacy, the departure of a transnational utopian space. It is “tearing fragments of joy from the heart of the post-Charlie night”. It is giving voice to, reappropriating one’s own story of colonial history. It is throwing everything into question, daring other ways of directing, other ways of working. It is shifting registers when no-one can tell, in front of the camera, the truth or even their own truth. It is confronting the soul-shattering eyes of a child on the streets and expecting from the families that the desire to testify should come from them.
At the heart of these films, there are cries, breathing, apnea which provoke goose bumps. Crazy dances, furies. “Tears, parties, work.” Unforgettable faces. Filming things that will never be like they were before.
Lise Roure, Head of the aid to creation and “Brouillon d’un rêve” seed fund programme, with the complicity of Laetitia Moreau, President of La Scam.
1. All passages between quotation marks are drawn from the project for the film Young and Alive by Matthieu Bareyre.
Debates in the presence of the directors.