Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris

One AND Ones…

One of the central tensions running through the history of cinema, particularly in its experimental, militant or “different” forms, is that between personal expression and collective practices: film as a means of expressing oneself from a radically singular and situated experience, refusing its dilution into some supposed universality, or cinema as a way of creating a commons, the critique of the “auteur” thus becoming one of the conditions for a new politics of images.

But of course, in practice, the dividing line between these positions is fuzzy at best. Personal expression is always inseparable from the material conditions and collective struggles that make it possible, and every singular voice bears the trace of the multiplicity of voices that have shaped it: “I am already a general assembly,” to quote Judith Butler. Nor does creating collectively necessarily mean dissolving individualities into a mass. By redistributing the actions and functions of the “author,” situations can emerge in which radically new forms of expression can become possible: the “operative group”, that “network of complementary responsibilities” already described by Getino and Solanas back in 1969 in their manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema,” would then be one of the conditions for a truly new cinema.

It’s this tension that we decided to explore in the Focus programme of the 28th Festival of Different and Experimental Cinemas in 2026. Not a programme devoted solely to collective practices in experimental and different cinemas, nor a celebration of cinema as individual expression. Instead, we want to rub the two against each other, to see where they catch. Hence the title “One AND Ones”. Perhaps as a nod to Godard, and to his shift from the “+” in One + One to the “and” in Here and Elsewhere, made with Miéville. In programming language, the “AND” operator dictates that the terms it connects have to be taken together, without necessarily resolving the antagonisms between them.

So, from October 9 to 18, 2026, the programme will bring together works in which collective or anonymous archives become the building blocks for first-person expression, alongside others in which intimate experience is both grounded in chosen or assigned communities and shaped by institutional issues that extend beyond it. Films and round table discussions will explore collective modes of organization, distribution, and preservation as the conditions from which individual gestures and voices can emerge and circulate. Audiovisual and expanded-cinema performances will experiment with bringing machines, bodies, sounds and images together to produce ephemeral shared experiences, while others play with the possibilities opened up by superimposing images, bodies and temporalities. Films, performances and round tables will therefore unfold across a range of venues in Paris and the surrounding area, including several recently opened spaces, many of them themselves collectively run: ART_L, l’Anomalie, la Dynamo, The Wrong Side, the AERI, Mains d’Œuvres and others (whom we thank for their hospitality!).

The International Competition will also be moving to a new venue this year: its six screenings will take place at the L’Archipel cinema, with many filmmakers in attendance. What remains unchanged, however, is the collective work of the selection committee, which this year have selected 45 films from 28 different countries out of nearly 1,700 submissions. Here too, we had to work collectively, negotiating and balancing the individual sensibilities and cinematic interests of each committee member in order to arrive at a selection that is somehow both eclectic and coherent. As every year, the Jury’s deliberations will be open to the public, offering another opportunity to see a collective process of discussion unfold. This will take place at Commune Image, which will also host repeat screenings of the award-winning films.

Like last year, an “Off” evening will be held on Monday, October 12 at Un lieu pour respirer in Les Lilas, this time exploring the dialectic between alienation and minority. It is proposed and coordinated by Frédéric Tachou on behalf of Soirées “Off” FCDEP and Pierre Merejkowsky on behalf of L’espace de confrontation aliénation minorité. 

Finally, the programme also includes a Young Audiences screening at the Halle des Épinettes (October 7) and at Commune Image (October 18), curated by Pétronille Malet from the CJC catalogue, as well as a programme devoted to filmmakers under the age of 18, at L’Archipel on Saturday, October 17.