2020 Docmonde Docmonde
There are those who leave and those who remain.
Those who decide to set off, ready to sacrifice their lives to check their fantasies about another world, on the other side of borders. And those who stick fast, grappling onto what they have, what is possible, where there is nothing, where life itself has become unlivable. “Leave? Remain?” : these are the most meaningful questions of our time. It is hence logical that the new generation of world filmmakers should grab hold of it. And this is even more true if they have developed their films within the international writing residencies organised by Docmonde, this network of documentary training programmes emanating from Lussas and permitting meetings and exchanges among filmmakers of all countries.
The heart of this programme was formed over time and at the rhythm that the films were made in Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, in Asia, Eurasia but also in the Indian Ocean and Amazonia. This subject emerged naturally as a thread running among the films. The ways of seeing expressed by their creators, marked by strong points of view and the forms they invent or renew, make this much more than a simple selection of films based on a theme, but indeed point to the emergence of a cinema that recounts simply the world as it is today and how people manage to live in it. Given the current state of things, this is so precious!
Four films produced last year have been selected. They explore the repercussions of mass population movements: sex tourism, economic migration, fragmented identities, the search for self… If we look at them together, the outline of a new world appears where, from North to South, the issue of crossing borders is no longer at the heart of the questions raised. It is replaced by that, burning hot, of the desires and strength driving the decisions to leave or to remain.
Madeline Robert