Is this how people live? *
In 2023, Fipadoc launched the Year of the Documentary, as much an honour as a Programme.
For us, the documentary is celebrated every year like a heady ritornello.
Since we last met, the human heart has been battered by all kinds of crises: loneliness, war, pollution of minds, bodies, and nature. The documentary realm reflects our questions about the nonsense in which the planet seems to be spinning.
Is this how people live?
Not only. People and the documentary-makers who film them cherish life too much to leave it at that. Our selection therefore also includes the fireflies that persist in lighting up in the middle of night.
They are silences captured by attentive confidants (The Mother of All Lies, A Sheperd, The Last Visitor or The Lost Boys of Mercury)
Words released in joy (Sauna Sisterhood) or nostalgia (Mémé).
There are also picaresque and funny odysseys, like Les Aventures de Guirec et Monique, where Arctic icebergs replace English Channel windmills, and where a placid hen takes up the role of Rossinante for a Don Quixote youtuber; or when the spirit of Joseph Kessel seems to be reincarnated in three nickel-foot journalists, off to ride geopolitics in 2002 Afghanistan (Riverboom).
Stories of friendship and sisterhood celebrate the collective intelligence and energy of women who have long remained in the shadows. Like the exploits of the women footballers of the first Women’s World Cup (Copa 71), who will open our Olympiadocs selection for the Paris 2024 Olympics. Or the talent of a female composer whose first name remained unknown for two centuries (Fanny, the other Mendelssohn)
Iranian women have risen against the repression of their very existence and the iniquitous violence of the morality police. We pay tribute to them in the selection (Son of mollah and Jina Mahsa Amini) and at the Casino de Biarritz with Femme Vie Liberté, an exhibition of Iranian graphic works where colour defies the black religious order—a stronger message than the gaols imprisoning Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Narges Mohammadi.
Noire, la vie méconnue de Claudette Colvin is an augmented reality work that plunges us into the first act of civil and pacifist resistance to segregation by a young black girl in 1955. It’s an eventful presentation set in a specially constructed decor that allows us to physically experience the moment when a schoolgirl stood up to the absurd laws of her time in Alabama.
A revolutionary or resistance song, Bella Ciao bursts forth in its Italian cradle as much as anywhere in the world when injustice rumbles. It will open our festival and the Italy Focus, which will showcase the ever-vibrant creativity of our transalpine neighbours in stories of olive trees, acrobats and even intimacy narrated by the master Marco Bellocchio.
And because documentaries are a mirror of their time and of times gone by, no edition of Fipadoc can go by without several works following the long trail of blood left by humankind, from yesterday to today: from the first colonial follies (Congo-Ocean) to the last genocide of the 20th century (One of a Thousand Hills), it’s only natural that documentaries should join the burning news of an ongoing war, bearing witness to the Ukrainian martyrdom in 20 Days in Mariupol.
Once again, there will be something for everyone, with films for the whole family to enjoy, young talent to discover and taste buds to stimulate, thanks to our Taste of Documentary.
Every year, you, our cherished audience, demonstrate curiosity, a critical spirit, and a love of reality that abound in our conviction that time and the sincerity of documentary filmmakers’ views are cornerstones of information. That’s why the General Assembly on Information will be stopping off in Biarritz to meet you and hear what you have to say.
Long live documentaries! Long live Fipadoc!
*Extract from the poem “Bierstube Magie allemande” by Louis Aragon, published in Le Roman inachevé (1956).
Editorial by Anne Georget & Christine Camdessus, president & general delegate of Fipadoc
PROGRAMME 2024
