Programme
This year again, the programming is an invitation to explore contemporary documentary cinema and its formal developments in the light of the history of cinema. Although funding opportunities are dwindling – with an ever-increasing number of projects to boot – and despite tightening conditions for film production almost everywhere, documentary cinema seems to be sidestepping the constraints. What’s more, the profusion of formal proposals and narrative structures delights in thwarting our habits as spectators. This means we can doubtless describe it as a cinema of resistance.
“Some long-used words are like nebulae carrying diverse, contradictory meanings with a secret kernel”, to quote Fernand Deligny. One such word is “resistance”. A cinema of resistance whose secret kernel could be contained in the endless interplay between mise-en-scène devices and the truthfulness of recording the present moment, as is the case of Luke Fowler’s’ or Jumana Manna’s cinema.
Invited to compete in 2021 (Being in a Place – Portrait of Margaret Tait) and 2023 (Patrick), Scottish filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler is both a portrait filmmaker and prolific biographer. As he proposed his two latest films for this new edition of the festival (Being Blue, shot in Derek Jarman’s former residence, and On Weaving, focused on Scottish textile design), we thought it a fine opportunity to invite our festivalgoers to become more involved with his work. A sensitive, almost organic involvement with which he embraces the world, whilst also revealing himself.
In fact, while his work intertwines the contemporary history of the Left with underground and artistic movements in Great Britain, his fragmented films seem to be pervaded by mirror effects where impressionistic sound and visual elements and the editing work speak as much about others as about himself. Fond of 16 mm – a modest and artisanal form that disconnects image and sound – Luc Fowler plays on narrative constraints to highlight gesture. His cinema is an immersive experience that unfolds in waves, by accumulation, but also in fragments, which as if suspended remain and persist for an instant on the retina.
For fifteen years, the young Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist, Jumana Manna, has been exploring how forms of economic, political and colonial power condition human and plant life and leave their imprint on landscapes and bodies.
Be it young men in East Jerusalem, a masked ball in 1942 Jerusalem, the music of historic Palestine or the gathering of wild plants, each of Jumana Manna’s films circumvent the frameworks of an expected reality to document the staunch, resolute persistence of Palestinian culture and its social fabric. The violence of history is countered by subtlety, humour, the filmmaker’s tender gaze, as well as by an immense formal freedom that breathes a wind of liberty and impertinence. And, even more so perhaps, as her films are feminist, decolonial and ecological, which is what makes Jumana Manna a socially committed filmmaker.
This secret kernel referred to by Deligny is no doubt linked to the mystery of the close ties between a work of art and the act of resistance referred to by Gilles Deleuze. It is also what we invite you to experience throughout the programme organised jointly with Jumana Manna, a journey through the history of Palestinian resistance mirrored in the history of Palestinian cinema, which has been driven since the 1970s by the same question: What can cinema do? Maybe quite simply bear witness to the real situation on the ground.
Whether it is the political struggles of the 1970s’ international anti-imperialist movement and the stories told by older generations about life in villages now destroyed and wiped from the landscape – but not from memory –, or the perseverance and determination needed to live out each day under occupation or siege, Palestinian cinema is striving passionately to keep the Palestinian population from becoming invisible. A living cinema that bears witness not only to their material living conditions but also to their resistance and their capacity to create, in the interstices of life, spaces of freedom that escape the rules of oppression. While filmmakers and artists have changed their tone since the 1970s – it now being less directly militant “on behalf of the Palestinian people” and “against reactionary forces” – they all constantly bear witness to what it means to be Palestinian. In Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, in the camps in nearby countries or in the diaspora, each and every one “desires a full and dignified life and determinedly holds on to this”.[3] .
The films of the selection feature highly political voices at the convergence of anti-capitalist, decolonial and environmental struggles, of which Palestine seems today to be the epicentre. This year’s ecofeminism programme – which continues the reflections initiated in the ‘Festival Conversations’ section last year – bears witness to these same struggles to preserve the world, against colonisation, against the production-driven, patriarchal order, against warlike hegemony, against the destruction of the earth itself. The term ‘ecofeminism’ reflects the intersectionality of this fight through experiences of struggle and creation, intimate and collective histories, stories of resistance. Stories of resistance such as those we have brought together in our Front(s) Populaire(s) programme (from the political commitment of artists to the struggle of peoples) seem to illustrate Gilles Deleuze’s line of thought: ‘Only the act of resistance resists death, either as a work of art or as human struggle’.
Because cinema allows us to look reality in the face when it threatens to blind us, Cinéma du réel can ‘open our eyes’, as Jean Vigo called for, through the experience of multiple unique perspectives; among these perspectives are those developed through participatory, amateur or professional initiatives that enrich cinema with experimental and atypical approaches, allowing it to belong to us all.
Cinema belongs to us, and today more than ever it can be an enlightened, political and sensory experience that breaks the flow of real time, creating as many breaches in this chaotic world as possibilities for resistance.
[1] A propos d’un film à faire de Renaud Victor, 1990
[2] “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?” Intervention à la FEMIS, 1987
[3] Offing de Oraib Toukan, 2021
