Do you have to innovate to renew?

Innovation has become an injunction, increasingly underpinning the institutional imperatives that punctuate the film-making process. To obtain a grant, a subsidy or a residency, you have to constantly re-prove your inventiveness and compete with new concepts.
Documentary filmmaking hasn’t waited for this to become a determining criterion: formal invention is part of its ethos and practice. Forced to stick as closely as possible to the present, it has made renewal its modus operandi and its raison d’être.
Economic conditions determine the narratives we wish to produce: what room for maneuver do creative teams have, and who is the audience?
How do authors, producers and broadcasters manage to establish a dialogue to constantly rearrange the spaces of creative freedom?

Gathering around the table a new generation of filmmakers, producers and distributors, this is an opportunity to question the risk-taking shared by each agent, and the interactions that contribute to a genuine renewal of forms. Whether in the context of traditional production, self-production or the informal economy, the central question is the same: how to avoid losing the film’s initial desire?

Moderated by:
Cécile Lestrade
— Producer, Alter Ego productions, member of Les Amis du Cinéma du réel

With:

• Claire Doyon
  — filmmaker (Pénélope mon amour, 2022)
• Carole Chassaing
  — producer, Tamara Films 
• Quentin L’helgoualc’h 
  — filmmaker (Knit’s Island, 2024)
• Gautier Raguenes
  — founder of Studio 34 / Face B, in partnership with La Clef Revival
• Lucie Demange
  — filmmaker (Quitter Chouchou, 2023)
• Camille Baron
  — program manager, ARTE – Unité des Créations Numériques
• Agathe Debary
  — programmer and coordinator of FLiMM and co-president of the DOC association