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