Le cinéma comme il va #2

This edition of “Cinema as is” is taking place at a key moment: after a tentative recovery in May, summer was marked by the return of festivals - La Rochelle, Brive, Cannes, Locarno, Marseille, Lussas, Venice, etc.  - which opened the floodgates for releases this autumn, making it a particularly fertile season. To accompany this long-awaited effervescence, made possible by the efforts of festivals, producers and distributors, the programme features special showings with guests presented by members of the Cahiers editorial committee. 

The title of Antoine de Baecque’s recent book Le cinéma est mort, vive le cinéma  ! (Cinema is dead, long live cinema!) summarises the recent period. It explores the history of the proclaimed ends and rebirths of cinema and looks back at three years of crises with Antonin Peretjatko's Yellow Saturdays. But because reflecting on the present and staking on the future would be senseless without remembrance of the past, the restored version of Maurice Pialat's masterpiece Van Gogh, to which Cahiers recently devoted an in-depth article in their summer issue, is presented before screening in cinemas. The programme includes preview showings of films from award-winning directors - Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (ex aequo Jury Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival), which opens the event, and Compartment Number 6 by Juho Kuosmanen (Grand Prix at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, which ends the cycle – as well as new discoveries and revelations. While many of these films, often made through festivals and which have sometimes won awards – such as Murina by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović (selected by La Quinzaine des réalisateurs and awarded the Caméra d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival), Feathers by Omar El Zohairy (awarded the Grand Prize at the 2021 Semaine de la Critique by the Cannes Film Festival) –others have not yet found a distributor in France: El Planeta by Amalia Ulman, Hit the Road (working title) by Panah Panahi, Soy Libre by Laure Portier, What Do We See When We Look At The Sky? by Alexandre Koberidze. This aspect of the unknown, of paving the way, the purpose of our respective professions, whether critic or programmer, must be brought to the fore today.