Édition 2022

Each year, Cinéma du réel ponders upon the state of the documentary, its forms, its developments and the approaches of its filmmakers. This is what lends the festival its exploratory side, makes it an ongoing research project. In addition to the screening of this flourishing contemporary internatioanal documentary cinema, Cinéma du réel invites us to experience the world and cinema through a plethora of gazes on the world, a plurality of documentary practices and visions other than our own. Because cinema passes from the filmmaker’s mind to the mind of the spectator, it is an art of connivance, even collusion, between filmmaker and spectator, who experiences another imaginary, a universe other than his or her own. But this experience – which is also that of the other or rather the distance separating him or her from me – is singular inasmuch as it also reminds us that we all inhabit the same world. A world to watch without being blinded by the continuous flow of events. And it is perhaps through films that disturb, upend imaginaries, confront other desires, other aspirations, other dreams, that a discontinuity occurs in the inexorable unfolding of real-world events. This discontinuity, which questions, surprises, resists, delights, is what helps us to avoid being blinded and to look at our contemporaries. This is our invitation to the audiences of Cinéma du réel. Catherine Bizern

Documentary Africa / Carte blanche to African programmers

↓

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.