Against the documentary script
This is a trend that has been growing steadily over the last few years: the funding and development processes for documentary films are encouraging filmmakers to blend in with the standards of fictional writing. The treatments required involve introducing the character or characters, giving them a social or psychological trajectory, anticipating obstacles, identifying an objective, delivering a message… It’s a question of scripting the documentary using pre-established reading grids, setting the film in stone beforehand.
Ten years ago, Cahiers du Cinéma published an ‘Anti-manuel de scénario’ which exposed the impasses and liberal ideological underpinnings of this screenplay technique applied to fiction: impoverishment of the imagination, linear narrative, identification imperatives, obsession with conflict and individuality… This same movement is affecting documentary production, at the risk of making all films converge towards a soft, standardised and literal form.
Yet documentary cinema is precisely the art of writing reality, of putting it in crisis, of organising viewpoints, of thinking through possible flaws and discrepancies, not of making it conform and predictable. This Matinale is an opportunity to unlearn the good manners of the academy and the industry, and to imagine, collectively, possible lines of escape.
Moderated by: Stéphane Delorme – film critic and teacher, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
With the participation of :
- Léa Pernollet, writer
— Heidi en Chine de François Yang, 2020
— Là-Haut Perchés de Raphaël Mathié, 2021 - Claire Simon, filmmaker
— Apprendre, 2024
— Our Body, 2023
— Young Solitude, 2018
— The Competition, 2017
— Woods Dreams Are Made of, 2016, etc. - Gaëlle Jones, productrice, Perspective Films
- Albert Serra, filmmaker,
— Afternoons of Solitude, 2025
— Pacifiction, 2022
— Liberté, 2019, etc.
Accessible to French speakers only
Other speakers may be added to the Round Table.
