2024 Editorial
Partners
Gallery
Archives
SAUVAGE Prize
PRESENT Prize
CORTO Prize
THEMA
Tributes
Encounters
Connections
Experimental
2024 Program
The Editorial
2024 Editorial
By the founder, director and general delegate : Irena Bilic.
Irena Bilic
Founder, director and General Delegate
« The point today is not to reveal social cinema, any more than to stifle it with a formula, but to strive to awaken in you the latent need to see good films more often (may our film-makers forgive me this pleonasm) dealing with society and its relationship with individuals and things. »
« An Andalusian dog howls, who died? It’s a sore test of our cowardice, which makes us accept all the monstrosities committed by cowardly men on earth, when we can’t bear the sight of a woman’s eye cut in two by a razor on the screen. Is that a more terrible sight than a cloud veiling the full moon? »
Text spoken by Jean Vigo at the Vieux-Colombier, June 14, 1930, at the second screening of Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou.
No sooner have we emerged from sumptuous commemorations and historical anniversaries – relating, in order, to the Armenian genocide, the enormous sacrifice of the Great War, the hundredth anniversary of the end of slavery and the colonies, and, awaiting imminent celebrations of the 79th anniversary of the Great Victory over Nazism – than we find ourselves embarked on new absurd adventures, as cruel as they are lucrative. We’re at war again. Who’d have thought.
Another paradox defies reason: the highly proclaimed concern for the ecological subject and the survival of the planet, and the invention and use of radically lethal weapons against animate and inanimate nature – people, animals, plants, every construction and object, water too.
For the past 19 years, L’Europe autour de l’Europe has been dedicated to expressing the complex and multifaceted identity of European civilization. In the panorama of cinematographic visions of the 2024 edition – whether painful historical and personal memories (Cywia and Rachela : They Resisted in the Warsaw Ghetto, Fadia’s Tree), patient restitution and analysis of the mechanisms of colonial power (Sweet Dreams, Broken View), apocalyptic, disillusioned or amused glances – each film is a station towards the knowledge of others, a stance towards our soul confused by the ambient chaos.
The films of the Taviani brothers seem even more beautiful and wise, those of Jodorowski and Vigo even crazier and fairer, but they are all true bulwarks against demented barbarity.
The intuition of Europe’s “new wave” filmmakers is fully realized: the traditional firm boundaries between documentary and fiction are blurred. With Peter Pan, Hypermoon and ‘Home’, for example, the distinction is no longer necessary, it’s merely protocol. What interests these young filmmakers is man’s position in the world, past and present. They are “putting a certain world on trial”, and turning to “social cinema” of general interest, as Jean Vigo had already advocated.
As our poster suggests, the face in the crowd, any face, every face, the gaze that turns, that looks back at you, the actor’s
face, the man’s face – this is the story of Man in History.
Come and meet Juliette and Jean, the newlyweds from L’Atalante, in another story, that of Emir Kusturica’s Underground, another anthological film from European cinema!
Great screenings, great meetings !
