2000 – 2008: The validation (Cannes and the big screen)
2000: Back to the Centre Pompidou. To celebrate the new millennium, a programme entitled “De l’amour” breaks with the ritual discovery of a foreign cinema. The Grand Prix honors Rithy Panh and his film La Terre des âmes errantes (The Land of the Wandering Souls).
2001: The most controversial film at the festival that year is Pedro Costa’s No quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room). The film breaks with a certain idea of direct cinema and documentary storytelling.
2002: “The deceptive ease offered by new technical possibilities such as small cameras” is causing many films to tip over into the realm of video recording, the intimate or, on the contrary, the reportage, warns the selection committee.
2003: The festival loses its subtitle of “International Festival of Ethnographic and Sociological Films”. Rithy Panh’s new film, S-21, la machine de mort khmère rouge (S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine), is withdrawn at the very last moment from Cinéma du réel to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
2004: Last edition for Suzette Glénadel, after 17 years at the helm. Jean Rouch passes away in Niger a few days earlier. The second screening of Eyal Sivan and Michel Kleifi’s film Route 181, shot jointly by an Israeli and a Palestinian on the 1947 partition’s route between their two countries, is canceled for “risk to public order”.
2005: Marie-Pierre Duhamel-Muller succeeds Suzette Glénadel. While maintaining the festival’s historic heritage, she opens it up to other forms of writing, from visual arts to photography, and to new ways of talking about films, through theater or script readings. 2004 has been a fertile year for documentary cinema. Michael Moore wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes with Fahrenheit 9/11, and there is an influx of theatrical releases, including two Asian films that creates quite a buzz : Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Wang Bing’s West Of The Tracks.
2006: The catalogue changes its format for the first time since 1979. Another innovation is the creation of a Prix des Jeunes (Youth Award) by a jury of high school students accompanied that year by filmmaker Mariana Otero.
2007: To quote its General Delegate, who has taken on the name of Artistic Director, the documentary offers us a “geography lesson”, “because it persists in giving us back our sight (and hearing), in being concerned with the invisible(s), in finding the narrative of what is on the margins, underneath”.
2008: 30th Festival. A new opening on the United States, in counterpoint to the “cinéma-vérité” figures of the sixties. Introduction to the work of a great Filipino filmmaker, whose films oscillate between fiction and documentary : Lav Diaz. A programme on tourism, “considered as one of the fine arts”, questions the true function of the filmmaker.