From August 23 to 28, we touched the sky in Angoulême. Like every year, a constellation of stars beat the pavement of the Cité des Valois, while the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival celebrated its 15th birthday…
By Farah Malaoui
An anniversary edition
The Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, which has seen constantly increasing attendance since its creation in 2008. This summer: 52,000 extras from a parallel universe, that of cinema led by Dominique Besnehard and Marie France Brière -his servants- invaded the dark rooms in Angoulême.
Outdoors, an XXL exhibition celebrates the FFA’s anniversary. Suspended from the lampposts, Christophe Brachet’s black and white photos leaf through the souvenir album of the last 14 editions without nostalgia.
Committed and popular programming
Honoring Rwandan cinema, this 2022 edition showed a very feminized program, 7 out of 10 films in competition are carried by female directors. A sign of reinvigorated health? The cinema has summoned all its genres in previews: ultra-realistic or whimsical, wacky and funny, serious or even documented. And what are we talking about? Mainly from us. Compile all the strata that make up our society, with all the evils that convulse it. Make a resolutely contemporary vertical sampling. Raw, the questions of meaning and existentiality shine like disorderly stars that collide and subjugate us.
And the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival also highlights popular cinema. The programming this year has zoomed in on social issues with first-degree sensitivity. The competition jury chaired by André Dussolier who also served 2 films in this edition, awarded the Valois de Diamant -the highest award- to the film The worst, the first feature film by Lise Akoka and Romane Guéret. A tonic human comedy, carried by novice actors, very young. It is the childhood of art that echoes the film The sixth child by Léopold Legrand, who distinguished herself by winning 4 prizes including that of the screenplay and the best actress for Sara Giraudeau. A poignant story that questions the deep desire for motherhood hit by an implacable social reality.
Discoveries and nuggets
In this exotic parenthesis of French cinema: we discover, we learn, we feel, we question, in short, all the means are good to walk… towards oneself. A trip to Morocco with “Le Bleu du Caftan” by Maryam Touzani also received the Valois for directing and that of the actor awarded to Saleh Bakri for his delicate incarnation of feelings under the weight of culture.
A few nuggets also shed light on the painful jolts in our trajectory like white pebbles strewn in our collective history, like “Our brothers” by Rachid Bouchareb or “the secrets of my father” by Véra Belmont, which remind us that the past illuminates the present and invites us to decide the future at each step of our personal adventure.
One of the films from the last day of the festival seems to provide the only plausible answer to all doubts: you will choose lifethe first sensitive and philosophical film more than spiritual, by Stéphane Freiss which juxtaposes attachment to heaven and servitude to the earth (or vice versa), the only film twice selected by the festivals of Angoulême and Saint-Jean de Luz, at follow.
In short, from the first glance to the tributes paid to the cinema, all the films blaze in Angoulême. By way of closing, the star Louis Garrel invited us to slip away like a sentimental thug under the skin of Roschdy Zem, with Anouk Grinberg and Noémie Merlant, to meet us in the Basque Country from October 3 to 9 at Saint Jean de Luz International Film Festival.
visual(c) festival poster
Angoulême Francophone Film Festival: 52,000 extras on the city ramparts