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The Champs-Élysées Film Festival, window to a dreamy and chaotic world

2020-06-16T11:47:19.167Z


The event, which was held online for its ninth edition, stands out with quality independent programming and its stories, as wacky as they are fascinating.


Demonstrations of the summer, it is one of those which held out. Coronavirus or not, it is out of the question to deprive moviegoers of the Champs-Élysées Film Festival, for Sophie Dulac. Health crisis obliges, it is not on the most beautiful avenue of the world that the organizer of the event gave an appointment to the amateurs of independent cinema this year, but online, for a ninth edition "solidarity" .

Read also: The Champs-Élysées offer their cinema festival

And the audience responded to the producer’s call. In such great numbers, that the 500 virtual seats of the Jumbo projectionon the opening evening last Tuesday, thousands of festival-goers stormed, saturating the servers and making viewing impossible for almost an hour. A technical concern that bodes well for director Zoé Wittock, whose film, which tells the love story between a young girl and a merry-go-round, will have no trouble finding its audience for its theatrical release on July 1. In front of this incredible journey, well served by his photography and his talented performers (Noémie Merlant, Emmanuelle Bercot and Bastien Bouillon), there is no doubt that French independent cinema has a bright future ahead of it. And young authors do not lack creativity to tell the stories that fascinate them.

In the short films Beauty Boys and Genius Loci , Florent Gouëlou and Adrien Merigeau, delve into the world of drag queens from the French countryside and into a metaphysical Picassian trip. Léa Forest, tells about masculinity through nine young boys, clients of a hair salon in the touching documentary On fait salon . Thomas Vernay, tells him about femininity in Miss Chazelle, where two young girls compete for the price of a beauty contest in Chazelles-sur-Lyon.

On the other side of the Atlantic, we are looking at the most vulnerable: prison inmates ( Huntsville Station by Chris Filippone and Jamie Meltzer), precarious employees who restock vending machines with snacks ( To Sonny by Maggie Briggs and Federico Spiazzi) and missing persons in Mexico ( Sin Cielo by Jianna S. Marten).

Cruel reality

For feature films, these are the documentaries that stand out from the excellent American selection. In Crestone , director Marnie Ellen Hertzler follows her childhood friends, who have become somewhat "sectarian" Soundcloud rappers. Tattooed from head to toe, the gang lives cut off from the world, growing marijuana in the middle of the Colorado desert. The journalist Davy Rothbart, he looks with 17 Blocks on the family of "Smurf" and Emmanuel, two kids met on a basketball court in a poor district of Washington DC in 1999. In almost 20 years, he documents their cruel reality against a backdrop of drugs and violence.

In Paris, that of Jin is no less suffocating. In The Coming Night , a fiction by Frédéric Farrucci, the young man and former DJ survives as a VTC driver for a boss of the Chinese mafia in order to repay a family debt. An exploration of the darkness of the Parisian night with Camélia Jordana, carried by the magnificent melancholic soundtrack of the electronic music producer Rone.

On Saturday, direct from his home, the director Edgar Wright, guest of honor at the festival, explained that he too had been around the darkness in recent months. Everything is very calm. It’s like I’m in one of my movies, ”joked the director of Shaun of the Dead and The Last Pub before the end of the world, claiming to have lived his own“ zombie apocalypse ”in a London neighborhood. where restaurants and offices were emptied of their customers during the coronavirus pandemic.

A few days earlier, his compatriot Stephen Frears declared his love for France and his directors, Truffaut, Godard and Louis Malle in mind. The filmmaker, "shocked" by his "conventional education" , said he understood the bronca around the statues of the slave and benefactor of the city Edward Colson vandalized in Bristol: "I know what people are complaining about. When I discovered Laundrette's script , I would not have known why people were angry . This is also why I make films. To educate people . " Educate and open multiple windows to the world. The Champs-Élysées Film Festival could say the same.

Source: lefigaro

All life articles on 2020-06-16

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