Cinema: a springtime of feminist battles

Spring is a bubbling, eruptive season, propitious for protest movements and collective mobilizations. With Contre-chant : luttes collectives, films féministes, La cinémathèque du documentaire à la Bpi invites you to retrace the struggles of yesterday, in the light of the struggles of today.

In 1982, Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder founded the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir to house, preserve, produce and distribute an audiovisual heritage. Over time, this unique collection of films on the history of women and their struggles for equality, offers a fresh look at the changes taking place in our society, the consequences of which today are a thunderclap for cinema and society as a whole.

The enchanted feminism of the pioneers accompanied the struggles for freedom of abortion and contraception, the fight against homophobia, and the demand for equality and parity. Activists Florence Kennedy and Kate Millett, like filmmaker Agnès Varda, prove that these ever-fragile conquests are common to our time, that they are part of transnational movements of solidarity.

The ambition of Contre-chant is not only to give an account of a moment, not only a joyful one, of collective creation by showing the classics of the repertoire. The retrospective unfolds a subjective and passionate alter-history of the female condition, based on militant experiences that respond to each other over time and join hands across gender boundaries, across all borders. Because some of yesterday’s struggles are still relevant today.

The great Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani, who passed away last December, is the subject of a special tribute to shed light on the documentary side of his work. His last monumental film on the history of his country, Seule Géorgie, will be presented at the end of the season.

Once again this spring, regular events offer a flourishing panorama of creation. Fenêtre sur festivals welcomes the Festival du court métrage de Clermont-Ferrand for a carte blanche in resonance with Contre-chant, focusing on insoumises, those militant women with a camera. The Images documentaires meetings follow on from the magazine issue, with Mehran Tamadon and others questioning the filmmaker’s body on screen.

Du court, toujours devotes a session to the excellent work undertaken by Territoires en images to “transgress our established perceptions and push back the boundaries of our representations”; a session to present the universe of Annabelle Amoros, between imagination and genre cinema; a session with the magazine Documentaires sur le son, which accompanies documentary films.

With the CNC (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée), La fabrique des films invites you to hear Chilean filmmaker René Ballesteros talk about his new film project in progress, on Mapuche land. For La cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde, an exceptional double screening with Dominique Cabrera will take place in his presence. Stéphane Breton’s seminar, in partnership with Ehess, returns again in May and June, this time focusing on the possible combinations of word and image.

Les yeux doc à midi offers the visions of such demanding authors as Alain Cavalier, Richard Dindo, Harun Farocki, Abbas Kiarostami, Edgar Morin, Claudio Pazienza, ou Jean Rouch. Test films, but above all works in their own right, offered by the lesyeuxdoc.fr platform.

Once again, special screenings with our major partners offer an exclusive opportunity to discover Alexis Pazoumian‘s first film, thanks to France Télévisions, and Sylvère Petit‘s first feature-length documentary, thanks to ARTE. Last but not least, the three latest films by Marc Isaacs, Stéphane Breton and Benjamin Delattre will be offered as French premieres this season.

To find out more, download the spring program! (PDF, 1 MB) or view the full program on our agenda.