Hommage au Festival International du Jeune Cinéma d'Hyères

For the seventh regular screening in this series, the Collectif Jeune Cinéma is organising a double screening, in collaboration with Carlotta Film, with a preview of the documentary Jeune Cinéma by filmmaker and cooperator Yves-Marie Mahé, followed by a tribute screening based on the CJC’s collections. 

The CJC is organising this screening based on its collections of films shown at the Hyères International Festival of Young Cinema between 1971 and 1983. The CJC had a strong presence at the festival, and Marcel Mazé, co-founder of the CJC and at the time president of the association, programmed one of the festival’s two sections, dedicated to “the cinema of tomorrow” and then to “different cinema”. 
It goes without saying that not only our organisation, but a large part of experimental cinema in France, is heir to this festival, which was a veritable platform for alternative cinema in the 1970s: which makes a historical study of the festival essential if we are to understand what is still going on today in our French experimental ecosystem.
At the time, Marcel Mazé and the CJC had the good idea of offering the selected filmmakers the chance to deposit their films in the collection, so that they could be shown more widely than just in Hyères. At the time, there was no idea of an archive behind this gesture: the collection built itself up over time, sometimes in an anarchic fashion, but in keeping with the cinema that was being made at the time. This screening gives us an opportunity to pay tribute to this gesture of love that has enabled these films to exist even today, but also, in the continuation of Yves-Marie Mahé’s work, to open up historical gaps that will hopefully enable us to think more clearly about the present.