Édition 2023

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, making it an ongoing research project. In addition to the screening of this flourishing contemporary international 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

Popular front(s)

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THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH

“It is because the out-of-control and death are now the order of the day that everything is still to come: the creativity of human beings who are trying to recompose their world.”  With these words from her book Les Âmes sauvages,  Nastassja Martin invites us to invent ways of living that reconfigure our relationship to life, our ties with others and with nature. While this involves creativity and invention, it also means dropping the paradigm of economic exploitation – be it through farming, tourism or industry – that is depleting resources and destroying the living.

Since 2019 the Popular Front(s) has focused precisely on the way that we inhabit the world,  convinced that cinema and the festival together are a possible space for our commitment and our reflection. The films screened this year compel us to face up to the catastrophe of a civilisation that is precipitating human and non-human forms of life towards the abyss. They also enable us to envisage different ways of conceiving our relationship to life, our ties with others and the earth.

Siding with the spirit of the earth means not only questioning what enables a living environment to live a good life,  but also what is threatening it, and makes life difficult. It means considering nature as a living entity that man is part of.  It is on these issues and the way of rendering this belonging that we will be welcoming the filmmakers to share their experience at a round table on Saturday 1 April, to close this programme.

TARA

Francesca Bertin
Volker Sattel