This year marks the beginning of a new cycle for the festival. Because we are first and foremost at the service of the works, we have decided to invest in the Grand Action and to reach the highest possible level of quality for the screenings.
The traditional international competition will feature forty-four films from more than twenty countries and will be subject to public deliberation by an international jury.
About fifteen “focus” screenings will deal with the dominant theme of this nineteenth edition: technology, its role, its uses, its history, its paradigms.
Each experimental film is at the same time a technical object, a plastic object and an object that produces meaning. The first technique of cinema, that which consists in making film strips covered with a photosensitive emulsion run through cameras and then projected, is more or less well understood by everyone, at least in its principle. Digital technology, involving a new world of knowledge coming from computers, still remains for many relatively impenetrable in its details. Understanding what a film is as a technical object is therefore no longer as simple as it used to be. We propose to the public to take an interest in the technical workings of films, especially when the filmmaker’s intervention in these workings was decisive in giving the work its singularity.
Technique and aesthetics constitute the two pillars of any artistic cinematographic enterprise without the logic of one ever being able to impose itself totally on the other. Let’s keep this equation in the back of our minds to go through and cultivate this fertile program together.
Four special events will punctuate this edition: a program of films by filmmakers under 15 years old will allow us to discover films that are simply astonishing in their maturity, intelligence and complexity. A Super 8 workshop and a virtual reality immersion will be offered free of charge to festival-goers. Finally, a colloquium organized by the Labex Arts-H2H at lʼENS Louis-Lumière will deepen certain aspects of the program by listing and studying some ways of thinking and treating the optical processes of captation and projection in the 21st century.
The entire CJC team wishes you an excellent 2017 edition.