2022 Viewing experiences Viewing experiences
We are very happy to present our fourth and final “Viewing Experiences” selection. Another duo will take over next year. Viewing Experiences appears to be a simple enough formula. Terribly simple we might add given the lumps brought to our throats by many of the seventeen films that we will present this year.
Experience. We should let this term resonate for a long time. On a blank page. On a screen. And imagine characters, who would have remained invisible if a filmmaker hadn’t decided to represent them, to direct them for the screen. A meeting takes place, a documentary character emerges. “Documentary character”. The accepted expression is strange, paradoxical, contradictory. It expresses a tension that causes tremors within the very foundations of the cinematic practices that we defend. Documentary film characters abound in this edition. This one, modest, invisible, is Sami on his odysseys[1]. Rarely have we felt so vividly as in this film how art and myths can shed light on a being from within. At the cost of exclusion, of destitution. A fractured being, happy enough nonetheless for he allows light to pass... That one is Chance[2]. A young girl, a first name, a destiny. The smile of a child. The brutality of an adult.
Intrinsically connected to viewing, doubt and questioning leads filmmakers to transgress banalities. This process has nothing evident about it. Burning questions will be expressed during this week of projections. Films that are seen at a cost, that shake us and end up haunting us. For there are some, powered by a unique way of looking at a situation, a place, characters, that manage to fragilise our certainties. They push us to look with a new eye at what we no longer look at – for having seen it too often. They put us in a situation where we become able to see what we don’t want to see, more or less consciously. Here, Auschwitz, museum and symbol of a genocide, but also a trivial epicentre where hords of tourists pile in[3]… There, the parkland of an asylum for severely handicapped people, an occult territory made visible by work on the soundtrack. Denis Cointe, director of Barail[4] speaks of his film as “an invitation to pass through the image… of normality”.
Along this period we have been working as programmers, we have developed a certain number of credos. Markers found empirically and that allowed us to move forward in the selection of films. We let ourselves vibrate to emotions and to the sensory. Feelings that often were rooted in moving beyond, indeed sublimating the issues announced on departure. Emotions that arise from taking risks… For a film cannot be limited to an idea or a programme. It is obliged to push us outside our comfort zone. Those films are rare. We hope that you will find, in these works, the intense fire that we have seen in them.
Have a great festival and see you soon in Lussas!
Stéphane Bonnefoi and Adrien Faucheux
1. Les Odyssées de Sami, Robin Dimet, 68'
2. I am Chance, Marc-Henri Wajnberg, 85'
3. Museum, Yonathan Levy, 73'
4. Barail, Denis Cointe, 52'
Debates led by Adrien Faucheux and Stéphane Bonnefoi, in the presence of the directors and/or producers.