“Ecology without class struggle is gardening”, says the well-known slogan by the Brazilian trade unionist Chico Mendes. Let’s be mathematical. If that’s true, we can reformulate it differently: “Ecology equals gardening plus class struggle”. Addition, the articulation of forces, is always better for battling the devastations that threaten us, be they environmental or fascist. But this formula only works if we understand these terms in their broadest sense. So gardening here should be understood as describing all ways of cultivating relationships between humans and non-humans (animals, plants, lands, etc.). And class struggles, plural, should also be thought of  in intersectional terms, as struggles against all forms of domination (socio-economic, hetero-patriarchal, colonial, etc.). Addition, then, that implies broadening the scope of how we perceive these struggles, seeing how they fit into even wider contexts than we’d previously thought, perhaps discovering unsuspected, hitherto invisible allies. Reframing our perspectives, then: seeing differently, enstranging that which seemed familiar, familiarizing that which was once strange, making visible that which was invisibilized, discovering subterranean links between beings and how their existences can overlap. All that, cinema - and especially different and experimental cinemas - knows how to do.

After all, isn’t that what different and experimental cinematic practices are all about? Interrogating what we perceive and how we perceive it, expanding the realm of the perceptible and subverting injunctions about what we are allowed to perceive. Indeed, Scott MacDonald, the first to use the term “ecocinema” in the context of experimental cinema, wrote in his famous article “Towards an Eco-cinema” that ecocinema should “retrain” perception. And the field of experimental cinema is also where artists try to make and to do differently, to create outside the confines of an industry that has for so long been complicit in the very ills we face today. Of course, cinema can’t be the one save us from these ills. But it can at least propose other ways of seeing and engaging with the world and with society from within the enmeshed multiplicities of which they are composed. Ecological thought and experimental and different cinemas have one other thing in common also: the defense of coexisting multiplicities against uniformity of vision and generalized standardization. Multiplicities of perspectives, existences, temporalities and ways of taking action.

Multiplicities that are expressed everywhere, therefore, in this 26^th Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, taking place from October 13 to 20, 2024. For this year’s international competition, we received over 1,500 films and videos made in 2023/2024. A total of 44 submissions from 25 countries were selected, and will be presented at 6 screenings in the presence of the filmmakers. These screenings will provide opportunities for exchanges and encounters, as will the jury’s public deliberations. There will of course also be a session for young audiences, featuring films from the CJC catalog curated by Pétronille Malet and Robin Vaz from our transmission department, as well as a program devoted to films by filmmakers under 18.

Multiplicities are also expressed in the Focus, by the diverse, eclectic and sometimes even dissonant works programmed, which individually and collectively present a plurality of ways of approaching the articulations between “gardening” and “class struggles”. But also by returning to the principle of “itinirent” screenings, giving us the opportunity to discover these works in several venues in and around Paris: the DOC, the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, the Centre Pompidou, the Shakirail and the Grand Action, which we’d like to thank for agreeing to host us during the festival. It’s also in this spirit that we decided to organize a round table at the Shakirail on the “Experimental Cinema Ecosystem in Ile-de-France”, inviting members of various experimental cinema associations and institutions to come and discuss the many contemporary issues linked to the production, distribution and screening of these cinematographic forms in the region. And lastly, it’s in keeping with this logic of articulating multiplicities, however fragmentary, that in this catalog, rather than publishing long texts around the festival’s theme, we’ve chosen to put together a “bouquet” of fragments: snippets of texts, sentences, paragraphs or images, taken from well-known and lesser-known books or articles that talk about cinema or ecology or both, or original contributions sent to us by artists or theorists in response to Chico Mendes’ provocative slogan.