|
|
****** |
International Competition
Documentaries
# 6 |
Friday October 18th / 9 pm
Résidence Lucien Paye
Cité Universitaire / Paris
|
Democraty Year Zero |
Démocratie Année Zéro |
|
Christophe Cotteret
Belgium, Tunesia, Qatar
2012 | 1:54:00
Four weeks. This is the time the Tunisian people took to overthrow the dictator Ben Ali and make way for the greatest geopolitical upheaval of the beginning of the 21st century. Nevertheless, the Tunisian revolution, as unexpected and dazzling it may have appeared to the world, is part of a much bigger story. A story that extends from the first revolts in the Gafsa mining region in January 2008, to the first free elections in October 2011. In two chapters and 12 months of investigation, Democracy Year Zero becomes the eyewitness of this major event in its entirety, through the eyes of the main opponents and revolutionaries.
|
| |
|
Snake Dance |
Dance du serpent |
|
Manu Riche, Patrick Marnham
Belgique, Pays-Bas, Irelande
2012 | 1:17:00
Snake Dance, the new film by the Belgian documentary-maker Manu Riche and the English-Irish writer and scenarist Patrick Marnham, is about the genesis of the atomic bomb. The journey leading up to this story was a long one. We plunge into the jungle of the Congo in the footsteps of Leopold II in search of the place where uranium is mined. We cross the ocean to Los Alamos, the base in New Mexico where Robert J. Oppenheimer developed the atom bomb assisted by the best physicists in the world. We follow the bomb to Japan, where it destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Riche and Marnham introduce a second thread into their film, that of the German art historian and anthropologist Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Warburg was the first to demonstrate the importance of iconography -- a history in images -- in the study of civilisations and cultures. For instance, he studied the religious symbolism of the Pueblo Indians and more specifically the Hopi tribe, who lived very near the place where the Los Alamos camp was built. In 1923, the visionary Warburg wrote: 'What interested me as a cultural historian was that in the midst of a country that had made technological culture into an admirable precision weapon in the hands of intellectual man, an enclave or primitive pagan humanity was able to maintain itself.' Snake Dance is about the choices modern man has to make if he wants to survive. Like Prometheus, he makes fatal decisions that leave him alone in a world of chaos.
|
| |
|
Materia Oscura |
|
|
Massimo d'Anolfi, Martina Parenti
Italy
2013 | 1:20:00
The military missile testing site on Sardinia is picturesquely situated between the coast and a mountain range, a seemingly pristine natural setting. Yet it has been in a state of constant "war" since 1956, as the film footage of the military test series shot and archived by the site’s own film department bears witness. This cinematic survey by Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti is of a radically different nature. They scour the battlefield for signs of devastation: munitions, rubbish, rusted equipment. They make visible what actually cannot be seen. The soil is heavily contaminated; there have been repeated deformities in both humans and the animals that graze on the test range. With a rigorous visual approach that eschews any explanatory commentary or interviews, the filmmakers are less concerned with presenting facts than conveying some disturbing insights. The irrevocable nature of human intrusion into nature makes words such as "unspoiled" or "pristine" seem absurd. The death of a mouse before our eyes, the images of a deformed calf in its death throes serve as a portent that it is about much more here than just collateral damage from constant war games.
|
| |
|
October 10th - 20th 2013
An international jury overview the sections of short films coming from all over the world. We prefer documentaries which succeed in representing the complexity of reality and discover in a new way its sensible and perturbing aspects on the same time accentuating the ambivalent and enigmatic status of reality in avoiding sterotypes and simplifing conclusions.
|
|
|
|
