Festival: 23rd Brive Cinema Festival – Critikat

The only festival in France dedicated to medium-length films, the Brive International Meetings celebrate this hybrid format every year – between thirty and sixty minutes. For this 23rd edition, twenty-six films from all horizons have been selected by Giulio Casadei and his team. Very eclectic, the selection nevertheless suggested a certain interest in films representing a “resistance” against social injustices. If this spirit of revolt was mainly manifested at a narrative level and through the choice of subjects, a few titles nevertheless managed to achieve success. Â take unique formal paths to get to the front.

The projection of Sense of Water by Mohammad Rasoulof (in his presence) was one of the highlights of the edition. Funded by the Displacement Film Fundan aid fund for filmmakers forced to travel, this autobiographical film shot in Germany follows Ali, an Iranian writer in exile who encounters difficulties learning the language. Ali questions his lack of feeling when he pronounces a word in German which, conversely, touches him deeply in Farsi. In order to better understand the Germanic language, he sets up with Nazanin, his new bilingual partner, a fairly simple educational system: on a window in the living room, they stick post-its on which words in Farsi are written with their German translation underneath. Terms are categorized into a series of emotions (for example, “responsibility », «Âforget» and «memory“are grouped in the same yellow column). Ali has an ambivalent relationship with this learning: he wants to learn German to integrate but fears betraying his mother tongue and his roots in this way. By questioning in this way “emotional value» that the words cover for people forced to flee their country of origin, Rasoulof explores in an atypical way the tensions of exile. It’s a shame that the demonstrative nature of this minimalist fiction takes over in the second part of the film, when the execution of inmates that Ali met in prison is mentioned. We think in particular of this clumsy scene where he falls off his treadmill on which he has pushed the cursor all the way, then gets up with a head injury, muttering “executed“. After this incident, the story focuses on the character’s moral dilemma (restart his life in Germany or return to Iran to resume the fight against the regime?). This didactic slope is particularly noticeable during the denouement, which attempts to bring all the seriousness of the situation into a final, rather unsubtle exchange between the lovers.

In With Love and Rage (GNCR Diffusion Prize / Agence du Court), Bojina Panayotova immerses us in the Women’s Pentagon Actions of November 1980, when thousands of women gathered around the American building to demand equal social and economic rights, among other environmental and pacifist demands. Through the complex editing that he deploys from television and amateur archive images, With Love and Rage does not restore the simple history of the movement, but the energy and creativity that circulated there. The filmmaker thus replaces the expected voice-over with a first-person narration which is written between the images, using cardboard boxes on a black background. The interest of the process, in addition to making this bubbling film breathe, lies in its way of freeing the soundtrack from the weight of the commentary. Panayotova composes a patchwork variegated sound which oscillates between layers, recordings of the action, speeches, conferences and feminist songs (she also allows herself to bring together extracts beyond 1980). Of sorority, it is also a question in the tender Solo Female by Astrid Söderberg, who films behind the scenes of a «ÂOnlyFans Gathering– a weekend where creators gather in a house to produce adult content for their subscribers. The film focuses on the ultra-competitive aspect of this booming universe: through the organization of space (the separate bedrooms) and a series of situations, the house becomes the theater of growing rivalry between the characters A spiral of competition that these women, precarious digital workers, nevertheless manage to break by supporting each other.

Escape while we’re young

This year, youth was in the spotlight in almost all sessions of the competition. Although she often embodied the spirit of struggle mentioned above, certain films nevertheless stood out by depicting young people who, rather than fighting, prefer to flee a reality that is too restrictive. This is the case ofA sky so low (Corrèze Youth Jury Prize) by Joachim Michaux, who portrays, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, young followers of New Beat – a genre of electronic music born in Belgium at the end of the 1980s. Michaux certainly gives in a little to ease by using 16 mm black and white film, which gives his images an aesthetic connected and underground close to a music video. A sky so low nevertheless manages to grasp something of the quest for escape represented by the very idea of ​​“trance”. The film plunges halfway into a Brussels nightclub and then captures a wandering of several minutes in the pit, among the crowd of dancers: long contemplative takes record each of them in their bubble, the repeated flashes of the strobes freezing them in a rather fascinating way in positions each time different. Michaux embraces here the equivocal dimension of the celebration, a stronger when it comes to electronic music: does it lead to an isolation of individuals as the film suggests to us? Or, on the contrary, does it allow us to become one, to come together to escape collective anxieties? It is this ambivalence tinged with melancholy thatA sky so low owes its beauty.

Escape still transcends everyday life in Joan of Arc by Hlynur Pálmason. On the Icelandic coast, three brothers and sisters build a chivalrous scarecrow in the middle of hostile nature, then unleash a myriad of arrows and sword blows on it. The filmmaker here reuses shots already seen in The Love we have lefthis latest feature film. But if the images of the mishandled object appeared in fragments (to mark, among other things, the passing of the seasons), here they constitute the entirety of Joan of Arcwhich lasts one hour. Visions of the scarecrow struck by the children and the elements (sun, rain, snow and frost) resurface through longer shots, but also in previously unpublished rushes, as if taken from a two-headed project. By filming in fixed shots, always from the same angle, the seasons passing by via jump cuts around the puppet, Pálmason continues his exploration of the cycles of nature and the fluctuations of light. Cut into organic scenes, the film wonderfully welcomes the singularity of the landscape and its sound material – like the sound, fleeting and musical, of a horse energetically rubbing its back on the damp earth. Neither documentary, nor entirely fiction, both written and open-ended. the unexpected, Joan of Arc was the most beautiful film of this edition.