Cinema is ours

Cinéma du réel offers its audience – whether occasional or regular, cinema professionals or cinephiles – multiple opportunities to immerse themselves in documentary works: discoveries; films that raise questions; films that are sometimes confusing, if not surprising, propositions. Through these programming choices, one conviction is clear: ‘cinema is ours’; it speaks to each and every one of us.

But considering cinema, particularly documentary cinema, from the perspective of its reception at a festival mustn’t obscure what is at stake in its creation. Cinema – perhaps because it is also a creative endeavour that draws on a wide range of skills – is rich in participatory practices, both amateur and professional, which encourage makers to express their views and their relationship to the world through films rooted in their realities. From film education initiatives to rehabilitation courses and collective film projects, these practices enrich cinema as a common good with experiments and works that are always highly unique. Cinema is not just for us, it also belongs to us. 

These creative acts, whether accompanied and shared with filmmakers or not, take many forms: cinema becomes a ‘weapon of expression’ for young second-generation immigrants (the Mohamed Collective); an attempt to provide poetic and necessarily unique answers to the question ‘what is reality?’ posed during workshops led by Les yeux de l’Ouïe, whose films constitute a series that is by nature always unfinished; political resistance to the hostility of the current climate, which seeks to curtail the exercising of cultural rights in detention, when making films is also a means of (re)building society. It is time to listen to what the participants in these projects have to say about what is at stake for them when they use the tools of cinema, beyond the intentions of the organisations that support them.

Cinema is ours because it allows us to define spaces for creation and experimentation that are ephemeral and fragile, yet which, as if by surprise, suddenly come to represent utopias in action. Together, we can create other spaces and forms of time; together, we can catch our breath and breathe new life into our work.

Suzanne de Lacotte