Édition 2022

20 short and feature films (French premier)

20+ short and feature films (world premier)

A selection of filmmakers’ documentary debuts, in partnership with Mediapart. Six students are invited to take part in the selection process.

Ten filmmakers whose radical and revolutionary work once opened new paths of political activism and cinematic invention.

A selection of twelve films from a new generation of filmmakers from all over the African continent.

Six African programmers and personalities invited to share their views on this new wave of African cinema.

Claire Diao – A Franco-Burkinabé journalist and film critic, who initiated the Quartiers Lointains program, the magazine Awotélé and the company Sudu Connexion, which distributes African and diaspora films.
Jihan El-Tahri – Writer, director and film producer of French and Egyptian nationality. She started directing and producing documentaries for the BBC, PBS, Arte… She is currently the director of Dox Box, a non-profit association that aims to strengthen and foster the emergence of a community of documentary filmmakers in the Arab world. At the same time, she continues her activities as a mentor at the Documentary Campus in Berlin and at the Ouaga Film Lab in Burkina Faso.
Pedro Pimenta – He began his career at the National Film Institute of Mozambique in 1977. Since then, he has produced numerous short films, documentaries, and feature films in Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and South Africa. He founded and directed the DOCKANEMA Festival in Mozambique, and was the director of the Durban International Film Festival.
Mohamed Saïd Ouma – Filmmaker, former director of festivals in Reunion and Comoros, trainer and lecturer on Indian Ocean cinema, representative of Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles in the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI). He has just been appointed head of DOC-A (Documentary Africa Fund), a pan-African initiative to strengthen the documentary film network in Africa through workshops and funds for production and distribution.
Ikbal Zalila – He is a film critic and teaches film aesthetics, film analysis and documentary film at the University of Manouda (Tunis). He is the artistic director of the Gabès Cinema Fen in Tunisia.
Mandisa Zitha – She has been the director of Encounters Festival, an international documentary festival in South Africa, since 2007. She has also worked in documentary production.

Curated by Hicham Falah, general delegate of the Agadir FIDADOC and
its “Documentary Beehive”, five case studies from five different geographic regions offer insights into the diverse conditions in which documentary film is created and produced on the African continent.

Deprived of the public space, we thought that nothing more could happen to us… no possibility for each to find their place, defend it, lay claim to it. The value of what philosopher Henri Lefebvre dubbed in the 1960s “the right to the city” suddenly became clear to us. Our inner life, our desires and our wants need to be affirmed in the outside world: it’s no coincidence that the main place for venting demands is the street; no coincidence if the powers that be are making the street increasingly inaccessible: its conquest is always the start of a victory of the right to be ourselves and to change ourselves by changing a society and its territory.
The films we have chosen tell the story of citizens reclaiming these places, seizing power over what becomes a space of struggle, but also a place for self-assertion as a group and as an individual. Our programme kicks off with a commemoration of the events in Genoa 20 years ago. The activism of trans people in the feminist revolution, land requisition in Brazil and the occupation of the ZAD (zone to defend) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the voices of the Yellow Vests and the setting-up of a town hall with no mayor are all visible eruptions of the possibility for a new world, a new atmosphere. These films tell the story of political commitments that require concrete engagement in a here-and-now and a physical confrontation with the stuff of the world (1) at local level.

Catherine Bizern

1. In Barbara Stiegler, Du cap aux grèves, Editions Verdier, 2020.

THE GAME OF TRUTHS

The question of truth is core to the history of documentary forms, at least since Dziga Vertov made the “kino-pravda” into a tool for mechanically and authentically observing the world, and before his terminology inspired the project of Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch for a “cinéma-vérité” that espouses human subjectivities up close. The quest is even more pivotal, and in an entirely different register, now that the document – visual more than audio – is called on as “irrefutable evidence” supporting a media and legal rhetoric.
Architects, authors, filmmakers, theatre directors and researchers are invited to this third edition of Festival Conversations to question the value of truth that is ascribed to the documentary. Their approaches based on surveys, archive material and testimonies, all develop complex thinking on truth – not as knowledge and expertise but as a shared and open horizon, welcoming uncertainties, grey areas, and sometimes also silence. This documentary art facing the battle of truths will be queried on its relationship to evidence and testimony in a first round table on the role of the document in the legal, historical or political rhetoric on truth. A second round table will focus on the detours of the documentary via stories, re-enactments or fictions that open up myriad bypaths towards as many singular truths.

Alice Leroy

Previews, rare and unreleased films…