The Director’s Cut section, dedicated to new films that delve into the memory of cinema as their main inspiration and raw material and films that rework cinematic visual heritage.
Here are our highlights:
Dziga Vertov’s The History of the Civil War, restored in 2021, the centenary year of the original documentary screening, follows the hangover years of the 1917 Russian Revolution and contains images of historical figures such as Trotsky. This film was considered lost (or re-used in other works by the director), but is finally presented to the public, a century later, given the reconstruction work of academic Nikolai Izvolov.
Prism, by An van. Dienderen, Eleornore Eleornore and Rosine Mbakam – winner of the Best Feature Film Award at the last edition of the festival, with Les Prières de Delphine – departs from discussions and debates between the three directors to question the cinematic construction of whiteness and its relationship with power and privilege. The film is divided into three parts, each of which is the responsibility of one of the directors, and explores their different perspectives as filmmakers and their different experiences, a result of the colour of each woman’s skin.
In The Timekeepers of Eternity by Aristotelis Maragkos, ten strangers wake up on an overnight flight from Boston to Los Angeles, discovering, to their panic, that the rest of the passengers and crew have disappeared. So begins a Stephen King novella, then adapted into a TV mini-series by Tom Holland in 1995. Now, it is The Langoliers, Holland’s bizarre series that is transformed and reshaped through an animation and collage technique in this experimental film that praises the theme and the actors’ performances.